![]() ![]() ![]() From the outset, this adaptation was advertised as the most expensive production ever made in Germany (with a budget of DM 23 million, or $12 million). In line with this general trend, in 1977 Hollywood veteran John Sturges was scheduled to shoot Das Boot in the Bavaria studios in Munich. These projects included, most notably, Cabaret (1972), a substantial commercial and critical success (including an Academy Award for the German production designer Rolf Zehetbauer, who went on to work on Das Boot) the war epic A Bridge Too Far (1976), another big hit and also, of course, the hugely successful and influential television mini-series Holocaust (1978). Throughout the 1970s Americans were heavily involved in a number of high profile projects about German experiences during the Third Reich and World War II (often with some input from German investors, producers, creative or technical personnel). How did this epic bestseller come to be turned into a movie? The Making of a Blockbuster Movieįilm rights for Buchheim’s book were first purchased in the mid-1970s by American producers, who initially worked with Don Siegel and hoped to attract a star of the caliber of Robert Redford or Paul Newman. In simple, yet vivid language, mostly casual and occasionally salty, yet also filled with technical jargon as well as some poetic flourishes, the narrator – using the present tense, rather than the more conventional past tense – describes the activities on the submarine in minute detail, focusing his attention on the charismatic figure of the captain, while also including long passages about past events in his own life and about his current state of mind, including reflections, dreams and fantasies, and also about the current state of his body, especially its responses to the terror the narrator frequently experiences. By the early 1980s the novel had been translated into fourteen languages and sold two million copies around the world.ĭrawing on the author’s own experiences, the 600 page volume tells the story of one German submarine during the autumn and winter of 1941 in the form of a first person narrative of a young war correspondent joining the crew for its latest mission, which begins with drunken festivities on the night before the submarine’s departure from its French harbour, proceeds with alternating periods of long waiting and dramatic enemy encounters, and ends with the submarine’s destruction during an air raid taking place upon its return to another French harbour. Within a few years of its publication in 1973, Buchheim’s book, which its introductory note describes as a novel but ‘not a work of fiction’, had become a modern classic of German war literature. The original film and television series were based on the semi-autobiographical bestseller of the same title by German author Lothar-Günther Buchheim. … Terms like war and terror are everywhere, misleading young men through false ideology.’ The article revealed that Das Boot ‘is one of the most successful German films of all time’, having grossed over $100 million at the worldwide box office, although it was originally conceived as a mini-series for German television.īefore the sequel is going to be broadcast in 2018, it is worth looking back on the fascinating, in places quite convoluted and indeed controversial history of Das Boot, which goes back all the way to 1973, and on the enormity of its success in the 1980s. Bavaria’s CEO declared: ‘Telling an anti-war story is now more relevant than ever. In an article somewhat predictably entitled ‘Das Re-Boot’, on 23 June 2016 the Hollywood Reporter presented news about a sequel to Das Boot ( The Boat), a tense and claustrophobic World War II combat movie about the final mission and ironic fate of a German submarine: ‘Germany’s Bavaria Film and pay TV group Sky Deutschland announced … that they are producing an eight-part TV series set right after the events of Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 Oscar-nominated classic’, with a $28 million budget and a British as well as a German scriptwriter. His recent books include The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars (2005), 2001: A Space Odyssey (2010) and A Clockwork Orange (2011). Peter Kramer is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. ![]()
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