Ever wanted to be inside U-96 of the masterpiece Das Boot (1981) yourself? It’s possible when you pay a visit to the Das Boot set located at the Bavaria Film Studios in München, Germany. Beneath you will be able to pay a photographic visit to the Das Boot set at the Bavara Film Studio, thanks to Conrad Roxx.
Here’s my impression of my visit to the Das Boot set at Bavaria Film Studios. First off, I have to say that this was a guided tour, so I didn’t walk by myself. We started at the main gate of the Bavaria Film Studios, visited a 4D Kino with a Wild Western lore before walking through some other sets such as Air Force One, Asterix and Obelix, The Never Ending Story and some other uninteresting sets… After, finally, arriving at the Das Boot set, the first thing I saw was the magnificent conning tower. It’s an original 1:1 rebuild of a Type 7C U-Boot conning tower. All outside scenes of Das Boot (1981) by Wolfgang Petersen were filmed on this tower, like the scenes in which Lt. Werner took some photographs with his camera or when he got crazy of the huge waves or when the crew looked through their binoculars looking for the enemy. It all happened right here on this tower. However, it’s prohibited to go on the tower yourself… So, forget about those cool photographs you see yourself making here.
Next to the conning tower are various boards with stills of the original Das Boot film. After admiring the conning tower, we went to the “boat tent”, which is just… a white long tent. However inside, treasures are hidden, such as the complete u-boat interior of U-96 of Das Boot. During the filming of Das Boot, the u-boat interior was in one of the larger movie buildings and it was able to whip, so in the movie there’s the illusion that they found themselves in a real ocean.
The entrance was on the left side of the interior and the exit on the front, where also original submarine parts were used. Our tour guide said, that it was hard to find original parts of a U-boat but they had luck and found some old original parts on a old ship dump. So the interior was not made out of plastic but out of real steel and original World War 2 U-boat parts.
All Das Boot scenes depicting diving or being submerged in the ocean were filmed in the studio itself with a smaller model boat. I took some photographs of the smaller models made out steel.
For the movie scene where the crew leaves the submarine base La Rochelle in France, they did build a U-boat model which was 60m long and made with colored wood and steel. The 60m U-boat model was constructed to carry the weight of the original Das boot crew, if two more persons would have stood on it, together with the original crew, the model would have sunk. After filming the scenes in La Rochelle, they ‘parked’ the almost 1:1 sized model in the harbor, however that same night, after filming luckily was finished, a storm came up and the model sunk.
Last but not least, we visited the “Atelier” of the Bavara Film Studios. Here, we found another small model of the boat, the jacket of Jürgen Prochnow which he was wearing in the film and some other stuff like the film slate.
