Enemy Mine is based on Barry B. Longyear’s 1980 Hugo- and Nebula-award winning novella of the same name, originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and later  rewritten into a novel and even expanded into a trilogy. It is also Wolfgang Petersen’s US-debut film direction, after his international breakthrough with the German World War II movie Das Boot (1981), which received six Academy Award nominations, and the well-received fantasy film The NeverEnding Story(1984).