DAS BOOT [THE BOAT] 75
production with an international profile, Bavaria initially sought Hollywood
prestige and expertise. In the early stages of development John Sturges (The Great
Escape) was hired to direct and Robert Redford was signed on to play the U- Boat
captain. By 1978 Don Siegel had replaced Sturges as director and Paul Newman
had replaced Redford in the lead role, but Buchheim and the producers at Bavaria
rejected the American script and the proj ect ground to a halt. In 1979 Bavaria’s
new studio head, Günter Rohrbach, deci ded to entrust Das Boot to a fellow Ger-
man: director Wolfgang Petersen. Heinrich Lehmann- Willenbrock (1911–1986), the
captain of U-96 (the boat on which Buchheim served), and Hans- Joachim Krug,
former first officer on U-219, were hired as con sul tants. Planning twin proj ects— a
feature film and a TV mini- series cut from the same material— Bavaria shared pro-
duction with two German public tele vi sion stations, the BBC, and public broad-
casting outlets in Austria and Italy. The bud get was set at 25 million Deutschmarks
(about $12 million USD), making Das Boot the most expensive German film up to
that time (Haase, 2007, pp. 74–75).
Production
Wolfgang Petersen’s guiding princi ple in making Das Boot was to achieve the high-
est pos si ble degree of authenticity and realism. He would have preferred to film
inside a real U- boat, but the only surviving VIIC– class U- boat is U-995, a museum
ship since 1972 that is located near Kiel, on the Baltic Sea, that could not be used
for filming. Instead, Petersen and his crew constructed a number of U- boat models
at Bavaria Filmstadt, two of which were full- size mock- ups of a Type VIIC boat:
one for interior scenes and another for exterior scenes. The interior mock-up was
mounted on a huge, hydraulically powered scaffold dubbed “Die Wippe” (“The See-
saw”) that was suspended 5 meters (16.4 feet) off the floor and could be shaken,
rocked, or tilted 45 degrees to simulate dives, surfacing, or depth- charge attacks.
The mock-up for full shots of the U- boat’s exterior was the requisite 225 feet long
and propelled by a small engine. Additionally, a mock-up of the U- boat’s conning
tower was set up in a water tank in the studio for more tightly framed shots. To
heighten realism and a claustrophobic atmosphere, Petersen opted not to remove
a side wall of the mock-up that would have opened up the field of view; interior
shots were filmed by cinematographer Jost Vacano using a handheld 35-mm Arri-
flex with gyroscopic stabilizers— a smaller- scale Steadicam Vacano in ven ted so that
he could navigate the cramped interior spaces of the mock-up (Vacano wore a bicy-
cle helmet and padding to minimize injury). Location shooting included segments
shot in the still- extant bombproof U- boat bunkers at La Pallice, France. During
the shoot in 1980 the full- size U- boat mock-up for exterior shots broke apart and
sank. It was later raised, patched together, and sunk again on purpose in Das Boot’s
final scene (and was also used in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981).
The night approach to Vigo, Spain, was filmed using miniatures of merchant ships.
The climactic air raid scene required 200 French extras and a million deutschmarks’
worth of explosives. A French aeronautical club supplied vintage U.S. planes to
masquerade as British warplanes.