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Wolfgang Petersen (born March 14, 1941 in Emden, Lower
Saxony, Germany) is a German film director.
Petersen is best known for the classic of World War II submarine warfare, Das Boot.
Wolfgang Petersen was born during World War II on 14 March 1941 in the small north German community of Emden, where
the Ems River flows into the North Sea. From
1953 to 1960 Petersen attended the Johanneum school
in Hamburg. In the 1960s he was directing plays at Hamburg's Ernst Deutsch Theater.
After studying theater in Berlin and Hamburg, Petersen attended the Film and Television
Academy in Berlin (1966-1970). His first film productions were for German television, and it was during his work on the popular
German Tatort (“Crime
Scene”) TV series that he first met and worked with the actor Jürgen Prochnow — who would
later appear as the U-boat captain in Das Boot.
Petersen's first actual full-blown Hollywood effort (also filmed at the
Bavaria Studios complex in
Germany), Enemy Mine (1985), was neither a critical nor a box office success. He finally hit his stride in 1993 with the
assassination thriller In the Line of Fire. Starring Clint Eastwood as
an angst-ridden presidential Secret Service guard, In the Line of Fire gave Petersen the box office clout he needed to direct
another suspense thriller, Outbreak (1995), starring Dustin Hoffmann. The 1997 Petersen blockbuster, Air Force One, did very well at the box office, while
getting a mix of opinions from movie critics. In another recent project, Petersen executive-produced (but did not direct)
Red Corner starring Richard Gere.
By 1998 at the age of 57, Petersen was an established Hollywood director, with the power
to both re-release his classic Das Boot in a new director's cut and to helm star-studded action-thrillers such as In the Line of
Fire and Air Force One for Sony Pictures' Columbia/TriStar. For both Air Force One and Outbreak (but not for Storm) Petersen teamed up with the
German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who has also worked frequently with director Martin Scorsese.
Selected filmography
- Das Boot, 1981
- The Neverending Story, 1984
- Enemy Mine, 1985
- In the Line of Fire, 1993, with Clint Eastwood
- Outbreak, 1995
- Air Force One, 1997
- Red Corner, 1997, as
executive producer
- The Perfect Storm, 2000
- Troy, 2004
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