Columbia Pictures released both a German version and an English-dubbed version in the United States theatrically, but the film's German version gross was much higher than the English-dubbed version at the United States box-office. Produced with a budget of 32 million DM (about $18.5 million, equivalent to million €), the film's high production cost ranks it among the most expensive films in German cinema, but the film was a commercial success and grossed $84.9 million worldwide (equivalent to USD $220 million in 2020). One of Petersen's goals was to guide the audience through "a journey to the edge of the mind" (the film's German tagline ), showing "what war is all about". During production, Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the captain of the real U-96 during Buchheim‘s 1941 patrol and one of Germany's top U-boat "tonnage aces" during the war, and Hans-Joachim Krug, former first officer on, served as consultants. Several American directors were considered three years earlier before the film was shelved. It depicts both the excitement of battle and the tedium of the fruitless hunt, and shows the men serving aboard U-boats as ordinary individuals with a desire to do their best for their comrades and their country.ĭevelopment began in 1979.
There are also several different home video versions of various running times, as well as a director's cut supervised by Petersen in 1997.Īn adaptation of Lothar-Günther Buchheim's 1973 German novel of the same name based on his experiences aboard, the film is set during World War II and follows U-96 and its crew, as they set out on a hazardous patrol in the Battle of the Atlantic. It has been exhibited both as a theatrical release and a TV miniseries (1985).
Das Boot (German:, English: "The Boat") is a 1981 West German war film written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, produced by Günter Rohrbach, and starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, and Klaus Wennemann.