In The Peacemaker, director Mimi Leder and cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann exploit Eastern European locations to craft an unconventional action film.
The threat of terrorism may be an ever-increasing global concern, but The Peacemaker deals with a post-Cold War crisis of epic proportions: the Russian Mafia's illicit sale of nuclear bomb components to terrorist forces. The film was inspired by the 1995 reportage of Vanity Fair contributing editors Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, who wrote about the ease with which criminals in Russia and other former Soviet countries could steal and sell deadly nuclear materials to the highest bidders. In adapting this investigative journalism, screenwriter Michael Schiffer (Colors, Crimson Tide) found that the U.S. and other Western government intelligence agencies were surprisingly anxious to share once-classified intelligence reports. One National Security Council employee painted a rather grim picture for the scribe: "Imagine how even a tiny nuclear explosion a one-kiloton blast at 3 p.m. in the World Trade Center would change Americans' lives forever."
The Peacemaker begins in a remote part of Russia, where a nuclear explosion occurs during a train hijacking. Dr. Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman), a nuclear physicist and acting head of a White House policy group, suspects that the explosion might be a cover-up for the pilferage of a nuclear arsenal by terrorists. She and Colonel Thomas Devoe (George Clooney), an intelligence officer with U.S. Army Special Forces, are assigned to conduct an investigation. While her by-the-book methodology stands in contrast to Devoe's devil-may-care attitude, the two strike up an uneasy truce after the Colonel's contact in the Russian military is killed, and they themselves are almost murdered.
The first offering from DreamWorks SKG, The Peacemaker was directed by Mimi Leder, an award-winning director/producer of telefilms who studied cinematography at the American Film Institute. Leder launched her career with a six-year stint as a script supervisor on Hill Street Blues. She has helmed such acclaimed dramas as L.A. Law, China Beach and Crime Story, and the Emmy-winning mini-series A Year in the Life; she also earned an 1995 Emmy for her direction of the ER episode "Love's Labor Lost."
In selecting a cinematographer to photograph her first feature, Leder chose Dietrich Lohmann, a renowned German cameraman who has compiled approximately 100 cinema and telefilm credits in Germany, France, England and the United States. Born and reared in Berlin, Lohmann's interest in filmmaking was piqued by a job he held at a small production company after high school. He subsequently enrolled in the Berlin Film School, where his mentors included experimental filmmaker Alexander Kluge (Yesterday Girl), who, along with directors Werner Herzog and Volker Schlondorff, obtained state-sanctioned support for West German filmmakers under a lobbying organization known as Young German Film.
After his graduation from film school in 1969, Lohmann
became part of the burgeoning New German Cinema as a regular
collaborator of prolific director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. That
year alone, Lohmann crafted black-and-white imagery for
Fassbinder's Love Is Colder Than Death,
Katzelmacher, Gods of the Plague
and Why Does Herr R Run Amok?; his work on the first three of these
pictures earned him the Federal German Republic's Film Prize. In
the next four years, Lohmann and Fassbinder collaborated on
Rio das Mortes, Die Niklashauser
Fart, The American Soldier, Pioneers
in Ingolstadt, The Merchant of Four
Seasons, Jail Bait, Eight Hours are
Not a Day, Bremen Freedom and Effie
Briest. Lohmann also worked with many of the other modernist
German directors, including Herzog, Schlondorff, Edgar Reitz
and Bernhard Sinkel.
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