Pierre Schoendoerffer, who has died aged 83, was one of the few directors of war films who had actually lived out the adventures of his soldier heroes. The American film-makers William Wellman, Sam Fuller and Oliver Stone did so, but no other director explored the same subject as single-mindedly and doggedly as Schoendoerffer.
His experiences of combat as a military cameraman and as a prisoner of war during the conflict in Indochina marked his output, most directly La 317ème Section (The 317th Platoon, 1965), about a doomed French unit; Le Crabe-Tambour (The Drummer Crab, 1977), about French officers involved in the fall of the French empire after the second world war; his Oscar-winning television documentary La Section Anderson (The Anderson Platoon, 1967), which followed the lives of US soldiers in Vietnam; and Diên Biên Phú (1992), about a US war correspondent covering the climactic battle between the French Far East Expeditionary Corps and Viet Minh communist-nationalist revolutionaries. Through these films, which offered Schoendoerffer a means of catharsis, he never really left Vietnam – and it never left him.
He was born in Chamalières, central France, into a French-Alsatian Protestant family. Attracted to an adventurous life from a young age, he became a mariner at 19. He worked on a Swedish cargo ship, then joined the merchant navy, sailing the Baltic and the North Sea for two years. His favourite writer was Joseph Conrad, whose novel Typhoon Schoendoerffer spent three years adapting for the screen in the 1990s, although no finance was found.
After military service, he decided to become a film-maker. In 1951 he volunteered to become a cameraman for the French army in Saigon. A few years later, he shot a great deal of the long siege of Diên Biên Phú, but after the French defeat he destroyed his camera and films, hiding six one-minute reels before he was taken to a Viet Minh re-education camp. These were later used by Roman Karmen, a Soviet documentary maker, in his propaganda film Vietnam (1955), seen from the Viet Minh's perspective.
On his release from the camp, Schoendoerffer became a war reporter and photographer in South Vietnam. In 1958 his friend the novelist Joseph Kessel asked him to direct his script for an adventure film, La Passe du Diable (The Devil's Pass). Co-directed by Jacques Dupont, it was the first film shot by the cinematographer Raoul Coutard, the darling of the French new wave, who was to photograph almost all Schoendoerffer's movies. Filmed in colour and CinemaScope over eight months in Afghanistan, using local non-actors, it was nominated for the Golden Bear in Berlin.
Schoendoerffer then adapted and updated two novels by Pierre Loti, the French author of exotic romances: Ramuntcho, whose hero becomes a prisoner of war in Indochina, and Pêcheur d'Islande (Island Fishermen), set off the coast of Brittany. Both were made in 1959.
These works only skirted his compulsion to make films directly about the war in Indochina. One of the first films to deal with the subject, The 317th Platoon focused on the conflict between an inexperienced officer (Jacques Perrin) and a tough veteran of the second world war (Bruno Crémer) as the group struggle to survive in the jungle behind enemy lines. The difficult shoot, with a crew of six, in the middle of a Cambodian forest during the rainy season, added to the authenticity of the film, photographed realistically in splendid black and white by Coutard and soberly directed. "I imposed a strict military regime on everyone," Schoendoerffer recalled. "A war film shouldn't be made in comfort." The resulting film could have been seen as a harsh cautionary tale at the time when American involvement in Vietnam was escalating. Hollywood began to approach the war, seldom more effectively, some years later.
The Anderson Platoon, made for French television, followed American "grunts" for six weeks in 1966. Among the memorable moments is Nancy Sinatra singing These Boots Are Made for Walkin', a hit of the day, on the soundtrack while GIs march through the mud. This moving documentary took a more neutral stance than Schoendoerffer's fictional features on the war such as The Drummer Crab, adapted from his own novel. That film revolves around three military men – played by Jean Rochefort, Claude Rich and Perrin in the title role – as they recall the Indochina conflict through flashbacks. The film could be read as a metaphor for the decline of France and a certain involuntary nostalgia for the colonial past. Rochefort, Coutard and the supporting actor Jacques Dufilho all won Césars for their work.
L'Honneur d'un Capitaine (The Captain's Honour, 1982) examined that other French colonial war of the 20th century, Algeria. It deals with the widow (Nicole Garcia, one of the few women in Schoendoerffer's world) of a French captain (Perrin) whose reputation has been besmirched because of his war record.
There was a 10-year gap before Schoendoerffer made another film, but Diên Biên Phú continued where he had left off. Based on a book by Howard R Simpson, an American correspondent in Indochina, it is a searing view of a lost cause but is slightly undermined by some of the dialogue and the casting of Donald Pleasence as Simpson.
Schoendoerffer's last picture, co-written with his actor son Ludovic, was Là-Haut: Un Roi au-dessus des Nuages (Above the Clouds, 2003), a thriller set in Thailand, starring Perrin, Crémer and Rich. In between his films, Schoendoerffer wrote a few novels, one of which was made into the second world war drama Farewell to the King (1989), directed by John Milius.
Schoendoerffer is survived by his wife, Patricia, and their children, Frédéric, Ludovic and Amélie, who are all in the film business.