The movie that sent Wolfgang Petersen into Hollywood exile: “I fell off the cliff, finally”
Not many people would have watched Das Boot and been confident enough to proclaim that its director was destined to become one of Hollywood’s go-to blockbuster filmmakers, only for Wolfgang Petersen to use his acclaimed breakthrough feature as the springboard towards crowd-pleasing entertainment.
The filmmaker’s third film earned six Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Director’, and was instantly greeted as one of the greatest German movies ever. An excruciatingly intense war drama, it had plenty of style to accompany the substance but not enough to make Petersen’s next picture any less of a surprise.
For his American debut, he settled on the high fantasy literary adaptation The NeverEnding Story, which cleared $100 million at the global box office and became the highest-grossing title ever released in his home country. Clearly, he didn’t see his long-term future in returning to drama, with Petersen continuing to make his name as a genre specialist.
The cult favourite sci-fi actioner Enemy Mine and psychological thriller Shattered both bombed, but it wasn’t long until Petersen got back on track. Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-nominated In the Line of Fire, the star-studded disaster epic Outbreak, Harrison Ford’s smash hit Air Force One, and George Clooney’s disaster drama The Perfect Storm established the director as someone who could comfortably handle big stars and bigger budgets while also delivering the goods at the box office.
Troy was the most expensive production in history when it was made, and it justified those costs by becoming the only big-budget historical epic released as part of the post-Gladiator boom that earned more money than Ridley Scott’s movie. Sticking to his costly guns, Petersen then remade a classic and suffered the consequences of catastrophic failure.
2006’s Poseidon is one of those films that didn’t need to exist. It didn’t stand a chance of improving upon its predecessor, and all the CGI in the world couldn’t overcome a lacklustre story and paper-thin characters. It lost an absolute fortune for the studio, or as Petersen put it to Vanity Fair, “That flopped.”
Little did he know it at the time, but it would be the last time Petersen helmed a Hollywood flick, which seemed strange, given his previous track record. That said, he still managed to find the positives. “I fell off the cliff, finally. And that is also good,” he said. “It has to happen. Otherwise, you go a little crazy.”
It would be another ten years before Petersen returned, and when he did, it was with his first German film since Das Boot. Now exiled from Hollywood, the crime comedy Four Against the Bank was a far cry from his days marshalling expansive sets populated by a stacked roster of household names and global superstars, and it would be the last movie he directed before his death in 2022.
Was Poseidon really bad enough to cast him out of Tinseltown for good? Arguably not, especially when he possessed a pair of his era’s most capable blockbuster-shaped hands.
