From rock bottom to top

Wolfgang Petersen on Air Force One and President Ford

by MATTHEW HAYS

German director Wolfgang Petersen has always been particularly talented at drawing audiences into off-the-wall stories. Witness his In the Line of Fire (1993), in which Clint Eastwood played the former bodyguard to John F. Kennedy, haunted by the fact that the popular president was assassinated while under Eastwood's care (based on a true character).

Now Petersen joins a long list of directors who have recently put the president onscreen. Harrison Ford plays the prez, who is taken hostage on board Air Force One by terrorists demanding the release of their leader in exchange for the safety of the first family. Petersen says the key to making any scenario believable is in the casting.

"You always start with the cast," says Petersen, from his L.A. office. "Not just with Harrison [Ford], who's perfect for this part, but also with all the others. If you look at all my films, you'll see how important casting is to me. To get the level of quality up, so that it doesn't get too one-dimensional and cartoonish. If you take an outrageous concept, and you're right, this is fantasy, but if you inject it with enough real images, people will eventually buy it."

Petersen, who made his name in America with Das Boot (1981)--the German-language epic about German soldiers coping aboard a submerged submarine during World War II--acknowledges the vast number of films that have come out about the presidency in the past five years. "I have no idea why he's showing up so much. Maybe we've just run out of characters for cinema. For me I thought this was sort of the ultimate action film, to have the most important and powerful man on earth, and it all takes place in the most famous plane in the world--the flying White House."

But Petersen insists his president is different. By casting Ford as a good guy in high office, the director says he is actually being subversive. "The difference with Air Force One is that we portray a pretty good guy. In Absolute Power, for example, he's a pretty bad guy. That's what I thought was so risky about our project, so fresh, so unusual. In this time of cynicism and criticism and frustration with government, which is sort of a worldwide phenomenon right now, I though it sort of gave it a fresh element. To make a patriotic film, in the best sense of the word, which I thought was cool."

Petersen is blunt about the fact that he, like numerous others, has lost a lot of faith in the political system generally. "One of the reasons we made this movie is exactly because we don't have that much faith in the system. We're all saying, 'Wouldn't it be great if we had a president like this?' I'm from Germany and I always had the feeling that in the last two decades we've seen the decline of the great personalities as political leaders. It's not the good old days anymore."

So why the precipitous drop in our faith in public figures? "That's very hard to explain. If you look around in all areas of our life, does it have to do with mass communication, does it have to do with increasing exposure of corruption, or with capitalism? Those are probably the reasons we're all a bit frustrated with our leaders. A film like Air Force One comes along and lets us dream a bit."

Petersen says Ford (that's Harrison, not Gerald) is the perfect person to renew our trust in the highest office on the planet. "As an actor, he's punctual, he gets his tools right, he doesn't cheat. There's a 100 per cent commitment to reality and perfection. It's the real deal with Harrison. He's not a glamorous guy, he's like a neighbour. That's why we want someone like him, because he's so likable. If he ran for president, he could probably win."

After a recent erroneous outing in The Advocate, Petersen was dealing with presidential-style damage control himself. The American national gay and lesbian magazine referred to Petersen as "an openly gay director" in a review of the rerelease of Das Boot several months ago. "They just put it out there and we couldn't believe it," exclaims Petersen. "As long as I know I've been straight and I'm married and have a son. The next issue they retracted it and printed an apology. I really have no idea where they got that idea from."

Air Force One opens this Friday, July 25. See film listings for showtimes