The German Storm

by Paul A. Schons

originally published by the Germanic-American Institute in October, 2000

Near this time of the year in 1975 (November 10) we in Minnesota experienced a major storm on Lake Superior. The Edmund Fitzgerald, an ore boat, was sunk by the storm that year. Our storm, though great in its force, was however not a "perfect storm". It took a German film director, Wolfgang Petersen, to provide a perfect storm in American movie houses in July of 2000. Petersen's storm earned $41,325,042 during its first weekend and over 100 million dollars by the end of the first week.

The director of The Perfect Storm is the same Wolfgang Petersen who broke into the American film market with Das Boot. Das Boot, based on a novel by Lothar-Gunther Buchheim, was produced in Munich at Bavaria Studios in 1981. Petersen's boat was nominated for 6 Academy awards. One of the nominations was for Petersen as "Best Director".

Wolfgang Petersen was born in Emden, Germany on March 14, 1941. (Emden is Germany's third largest port on the North Sea after Hamburg and Bremen. It is on the border with Holland at the mouth of the Ems River.) Petersen's family moved to Hamburg soon after his birth. He thus grew up as a Hamburger and graduated from high school (Gymnasium) there. He then worked as an actor and director at the Ernst-Deutsch-Theater in Hamburg. For two years he was a theater major at the University of Hamburg. He continued his studies for an additional four years at the Theater and Film Academy in Berlin (Film- und Theaterakademie).

Petersen now lives with his wife Maria in Santa Monica, California. (The city where Bert Brecht lived during his American film career.) By now he feels quite American and has a world view which shows a sense of American patriotism and can-do spirit as demonstrated in his blockbuster movie, Air Force One of 1997 in which the American President overcomes all odds to single-handedly take back his hijacked plane from heavily armed terrorists.

Petersen's earliest films were made for German television. He directed a number of episodes of the hit detective series Tatort for the German network, NDR. It was in one of those, Reifezeugnis (Diploma), 1976 that 15 year old Nastassja Kinski got her start in film. His made-for-television film, Smog, won the Prix Italia in 1973 and the Futura-Silberpreis in Berlin. In 1978 his Schwarz und weiß wie Tage und Nächte (Black and White as Day and Night) won for him the designation as "Best Director" at the Paris Film Festival.

In 1976 Petersen founded his own production company, "Radiant". (After his move to America he would re-found the company in Hollywood as "Radiant Productions" along with his partner Gail Katz.)

Petersen's reputation beyond Europe would be established with Das Boot. That film was nominated for 6 Academy Awards, the award of the Direcors' Guild of America and for the Golden Globe. The film won the British Academy Award and the Bavarian Film Prize. He continued to establish his international reputation with the Munich Bavarian Studios production of the fantasy, Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story) in 1984. The next international success produced from Bavarian Studios was a science fiction film focusing on racial tolerance, Geliebter Feind (Enemy Mine) in 1985.

His reputation and success on the American market were strong enough to allow him to make the move from Bavaria to California in 1987 and to continue his career without interruption. His place in America was assured by the acting skills of Clint Eastwood in the 1993 release of In the Line of Fire. He followed it in 1995 with Outbreak, a film about the horrors of the African Ebola virus. In 1997 he released the "director's cut" of his first international hit, Das Boot, as well as Air Force One. The Perfect Storm followed in 2000.

Petersen will return to Germany for his next film. He has announced that his own Radiant Productions in cooperation with Tandem Communications of Munich will produce a made-for-TV film version of Der Ring der Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungens) for initial airing on the German TV network, RTL. Work will begin on the 90-minute film at the beginning of 2001. The cost is estimated at 25 million German marks.