'Das Boot' blockbuster filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen passes away
German filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen, whose World War II submarine epic "Das Boot" propelled him into a blockbuster Hollywood career.
Films including "In the Line of Fire", "Air Force One" and "The Perfect Storm" have all died out. He was 81 years old.
Representative Michelle Bega said Peterson died Friday at her home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood.
Petersen, born in the northern German port city of Emden, made two features before his 1982 breakthrough, "Das Boot", which was the most expensive film in German film history.
The 149-minute film chronicled the intense claustrophobia of life aboard a wrecked German U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic, with Jürgen Prochno as the submarine's commander.
Declared as an anti-war masterpiece, "Das Boot" was nominated for six Oscars, including Peterson's directorial debut and his adaptation of Lothar-Günther Buchheim's best-selling 1973 novel.
"At school he never talked about Hitler's time - he got it out of his mind and focused on rebuilding Germany," Peterson told the Los Angeles Times in 1993.
We kids were looking for more glamorous dreams than rebuilding a destroyed country, so when American pop culture came to Germany we were really drawn to it.
We all lived for American films, and by the time I was 11 I had decided I wanted to be a filmmaker.