ON LOCATION : Wolfgang Petersen’s ‘Shattered’ Dream : The German director waited for a decade before getting his first American film produced. ‘Now it’s out of my system’

On the same Culver City soundstage where Judy Garland once skipped down a yellow brick road hoping to find some help in getting home, German director Wolfgang Petersen is now creating another adventure about a person who gets lost in a strange new world. But in this story, the strange new world is all in the person’s head--literally.

“Shattered,” Petersen’s first movie since “Enemy Mine,” will take us on a tour of the unknown through the eyes of a man who loses his memory in the nasty car accident that opens the story.

Tom Berenger portrays a successful San Francisco developer who accidently drives his classic Ford Thunderbird off a steep Marin County cliff. The plunge down the hillside miraculously throws his wife--played by Greta Scacchi--free, but takes Berenger on a horrible roller-coaster ride.

“And we, the audience, are in the car with him,” said Petersen excitedly, as he prepared to shoot part of the car crash sequence. “So the movie starts off with an absolute nightmare experience for the audience.”

The entire story is a journey through the emptied memory fields of Berenger’s mind. He remembers nothing, not even his wife, and what he doesn’t know, we won’t either. The film is told through his point of view.

“I think this is a great theme for a thriller,” says the director. “This searching for identity. Who am I? Am I good? Am I bad?

“Another element of the visual style is the memory flashes. Bits and pieces of memory flashback throughout the movie. Then at the end, this whole puzzle flows as a flashback, a roller-coaster of images and events that rushes over us. So there’s this movie within the movie.”

The $22-million production, which Pathe will release domestically through Warner Bros., also stars Bob Hoskins as a private investigator, Corbin Bernsen as Berenger’s partner and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as Bernsen’s wife. The film, which Petersen is producing along with John Davis and David Korda, is headquartered at the old MGM lot, newly rechristened Columbia Studios, and has filmed on locations in Northern California and Oregon.

Petersen, who directed a number of 100-minute thrillers for German TV in the early ‘70s, has always wanted to do a thriller on the big screen. So when he happened upon Richard Neely’s novel, “The Plastic Nightmare,” in 1978, he optioned it. Throughout the last decade he has been trying, on and off, to get the film produced. But, in a larger sense, “Shattered,” which is based on Neely’s novel, represents the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

Unlike such German compatriots as Werner Herzog and Volker Schlondorff, Petersen has worked on big-budget feature projects aimed at an international audience. “Das Boot,” released in Germany in 1981, established him as a major director. The claustrophobically realistic story of a German U-boat crew during World War II went on to collect six Academy Award nominations, the most ever for a foreign-language film.

His next two films, the elaborate fantasy “The Neverending Story” and the science-fiction “Enemy Mine,” though made at Munich’s Bavaria Studios, were American-style productions shot in English. But it was America itself--where he has now lived for three years trying to get a Hollywood production off the ground--that was on his mind.

In a trailer marked “Herr Commandant,” Petersen, a gracious man with a warm, reflective face framed by wisps of long, thinning blond hair, relaxes between setups explaining how, while growing up in the devastated postwar German town of Emden, he and other children would run to the harbor to greet American ships. “The sailors threw food down to us--bananas, oranges, meat, chewing gun. It was like gifts from heaven. This vision that American is something rich and good was my first encounter with America.

“After that, American culture came--Westerns, rock ‘n’ roll--so for my generation, America was something glamorous, like paradise. I will never ever forget that. So I’ve always had an American dream, a dream that America meant something promising, helping and positive, a dream that I would like to go there.”

He also feels a part of the great tradition of German-speaking producers and directors who have contributed much to the American cinema since the early silent days. The German press, however, remains unconvinced.

“(The press) loves to support you if you’re a success. But then if you leave the country to do something that is not homemade, so to speak, that’s a critical situation. They hit you for going Hollywood and being commercial and forgetting about your roots.”

Elmar Biebl, a Los Angeles-based correspondent for several German publications, agrees. “He has an image problem over there because of leaving and not getting any of his projects off the ground for 2 1/2 years. He’s had a lot of bad, sarcastic press.”

Petersen says he is willing to suffer the image problem at home for the chance to work with an American film crew.

“I was surprised how hard crews work here. We’ve been working 16-hour days. A normal day is 12 hours, which is never heard of in Germany, where everything is cozy and relaxed and lazy. The pressure is higher here with so much at stake. But I love that because I’m obsessed with perfection and quality.

“I’d get so angry back in Germany, where the first break (in shooting) comes at 9:30 in the morning and everybody insists on having a couple of beers. On ‘Enemy Mine,’ I created a revolution at Bavaria Studios by insisting on no alcohol on the soundstage.”

Because “Shattered” is being told completely through the eyes of Berenger’s character, the production has made some extraordinary physical demands on the cast and crew. When the filming is completed, there will have been more than 1,000 different camera set-ups, about twice the normal number for a feature film.

“We’re using a Hitchcockian cutting pattern because it’s (Berenger’s) eyes, his search, his point of view,” says veteran cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. “Even when he’s driving, I put the camera exactly over the steering wheel. When we have a scene with the car, we never cut outside. What he sees is what we see.”

On another day, at a location on Mt. Wilson Road, an observer can’t help but notice how Petersen’s buoyant personality keeps the well-oiled machine of principal photography moving steadily along. Between set-ups, he would kibitz with the crew or try out his Bob Hoskins impersonation.

“Wolfgang’s really funny,” says Berenger. “He’s cracking jokes all the time. Then right before the cameras roll, he’s really intense.”

“As soon as things get difficult, he gets excited,” adds co-producer Gail Katz. “He keeps everyone’s spirits up. When some tests involving special effects and makeup didn’t work, he simply said, ‘OK, now we know we have a problem. So we find a solution.’ He’s like a great football coach.”

Script supervisor Karen Golden says that of all the directors she’s worked for, only the late John Huston was as organized. “Wolfgang knows exactly what he wants.”

The jokes and organizational exactitude certainly help an obviously exhausted Berenger get through what he admits has been a “nightmare” shoot. He’s had only one day off in three months.

“It’s just too many hours of concentration. You do scene after scene alone, and then you get slack and forget where you are in the story. It’s been a challenge.”

Berenger intended to pass on the project but Petersen, he says, “conned me into doing it. It’s his personality--he’s so very charming and funny that after he talked to me for three hours on the phone, I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ He made it like a challenge.”

Greta Scacchi was in the middle of filming “Fires Within” when, on a rare day off, her agent dragged her to a meeting with Petersen. Her resentment disappeared quickly. “Wolfgang totally charmed me,” she said. “In two hours he persuaded me this was a role I could not refuse. I floated out of that office.

“What really persuaded me, though, was his personality, that boyish enthusiasm and the relish with which he described the story and character. That has continued on the set. For every scene and every line, he gives us exactly the measure and emotional elements he wants. He’s very precise. Quite dictatorial, really, which usually is irritating (in a director). But with him, you feel there’s one person in control. So it’s very invigorating to follow his instructions.”

As production nears the end, Petersen acknowledges relief of having realized one dream--making a Hollywood movie. “I’ve done it now. It’s out of my system. So I go from here and let’s see what happens.”

Yet after having worked with an American crew, he admits it would be tough to go back to the European level of filmmaking.

“When I do a film, I’m possessed for these three months. So I want to work at the top level in every respect from the crew to the actors.

“Because a year ago, I was writing a scene of a man being smashed inside a car. And now because (special effects supervisor) Roy Arbogast built this gimbal, I can do this scene and see it work. That’s just great. Working with the best of the best is so important for me. I go where I can make the movie I want to do.”