Jaws 2, Supergirl and Santa Claus director Jeannot Szwarc dies aged 87 after six-decade-long movie career

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

LEGENDARY film director Jeannot Szwarc from Jaws 2 and Somewhere in Time has died at the age of 87.The French-American director’s death was confirmed by his son Sacha Szwarc.5Jeannot Szwarc died on Tuesday at a hospital in FranceCredit: Getty5He worked on a series of films as well as writing and producing televisionCredit: Getty5Szwarc directed Jaws 2, the 1978 sequel to the first Jaws creature featureCredit: Kobal Collection – ShutterstockHis father died on Tuesday of respiratory failure at Central Hospital in Loches, France, he told The Hollywood Reporter.Szwarc had a legendary six-decade career in the film industry taking part in movies as well as producing and writing for television. He worked on films like Santa Claus: The Movie, Bug, and Supergirl as well as popular television shows like Grey’s Anatomy, The Practice, and Smallville.Tributes have poured in for the talented producer, including a touching note from James Bond star Jane Seymour.read more on film legendsOn Facebook, she wrote: “Today, we say goodbye to a true visionary.”Jeannot Szwarc was not just a brilliant director but a kind and generous soul. “He gifted us many timeless stories, including Somewhere in Time, a film that changed my life forever. “May his memory be a blessing, and may his artistry live on in our hearts.”Meanwhile, his son said: “He was a passionate filmmaker and cinephile his whole life.”Traits he has passed down to both his sons.”Legendary Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks writer & director David Lynch dead at 78 as devastated fans pay tributeOn Thursday, Jim Michaels a director on the series Supernatural posted a tribute to Szwarc.He wrote: “Very sad to disclose Jeannot Szwarc who directed 5 episodes of #Supernatural has passed away (here with yours truly and ⁦@JerryWanek⁩). “His other credits are too many to list. The film & television world sends a virtual group hug to his family.”Jeffrey Kramer who starred in the first two Jaws movies called him “one of the finest most talented souls.”BIRTH OF A FILM LEGENDThe director was born in Paris in 1937 but grew up in Argentina before heading stateside to get a master’s degree at Harvard University.Once back in France, he worked on documentaries and television adverts before returning to the US to work on television shows and films.Szwarc started his 60-year career at Universal in Hollywood where he was hired to replace Jaws 2 director Verna Fields while also preparing a TV pilot for Quinn Martin.This would be his second film after directing Bug in 1975.Speaking to Film Talk in 2019 about taking on the shark film, he said: “I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t have a clue.”I told them that the dialogue was terrible, but the action was good.” His work on that successful film which earned $77 million in its initial release making it the sixth highest-grossing film of 1978, started a domino effect for the director.Read more on the Scottish SunHe was then selected to direct Somewhere in Time and from there his career took off.Szwarc is survived by his two sons Sacha and Stefan and his wife Cara.5He directed the 1985 movie Santa Clause: The Movie starring David Huddleston and Dudley MooreCredit: Alamy5Tributes have been made to the director with Jane Seymour praising his talentCredit: Alamy

David Lynch: the filmmaker with singular vision who believed that ‘no one really dies’

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

The hours since the death of artist and film director David Lynch on January 16 have seen a huge outpouring of love. Tributes have come from those who worked with him, including actors Kyle MacLachlan and Naomi Watts, and other directors such as Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Edgar Wright. But they’ve also come from his legion of fans, who have taken to social media to share personal stories of how his films have profoundly touched their lives.

From his debut feature Eraserhead (1977), Lynch revealed himself as a filmmaker with a unique and singular vision. Describing the film as “a dream of dark and troubling things”, Lynch drew from his background in painting and experimental film. The slight narrative provided an opening into a strange new world that followed a twisted dream logic but still seemed familiar.

Lynch was renowned for his steadfast refusal to provide answers as to what his films mean. When asked in a Bafta interview to elaborate on his claim that Eraserhead is his “most spiritual film”, for example, Lynch abruptly answered: “No.”

In his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (2006), Lynch wrote: “The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was done, or how this means this or that means that, the next time that see the film, these things enter into the experience.”

While Lynch marked himself as a true auteur, whose films express a very specific and personal worldview, there is space for each audience member to bring their own dreams and desires into the viewing experience. Perhaps this is why his work inspires such devotion as his fans become attached to the work, filling the gaps in meaning with parts of themselves.

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Lynch’s ‘art life’

From a young age Lynch wanted to become an artist, to live what he called “the art life”. This involves complete dedication to creative pursuits, at the expense of all else.

Part of this process involves “diving within”, which for Lynch was closely linked to the practice of transcendental meditation. In an interview with Sight and Sound in December 2024, Lynch explained that by diving into this “ocean of consciousness”, people can experience “unbounded creativity.”

It is from this “ocean” that Lynch also spoke of “catching the big fish” – that is, catching an idea, whether it be for a film, a painting or a story. Unlike filmmakers and screenwriters in the Hollywood mainstream, Lynch did not follow typical narrative structures.

This is why his one attempt at making a Hollywood blockbuster, the 1984 film Dune, was a failure. Lynch was forced to compromise his vision and denied his final cut.

Lynch on fishing for ideas.

Yet this disappointment led the way for his 1986 film Blue Velvet which, although made on a much smaller scale, had a significant cultural impact. It garnered him his second of three Oscar nominations for best director. His first was for The Elephant Man in 1980 and his last was for Mulholland Drive, in 2001.

Nodding to his roots growing up in towns in Montana, Washington, Idaho and Virginia, Blue Velvet exposed the dark underbelly that exists beneath the white picket fences of suburbia. This darkness was both frightening and attractive to protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont, played by Kyle MacLachlan, who mimicked Lynch’s speech and mannerisms.

MacLachlan and Lynch teamed up again for the television series Twin Peaks, which aired on ABC in 1990 and became a cultural phenomenon. Like Blue Velvet, it revealed a secret world underneath the quotidian, using the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) to uncover a true darkness residing in the heart of the American home.

Lynch and long-time collaborator Kyle MacLachlan in 2017.
Associated Press/Alamy Stock Photo

‘No one really dies’

The same year that Twin Peaks debuted, Lynch also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for his film Wild at Heart and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. But the bubble burst in 1992 when his prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me received a hostile reception critically and commercially. Fire Walk with Me has since been reevaluated as a film that presents the shattering effects of the trauma of abuse. I wrote a book about it in 2018.

In his later films Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), identity is similarly fractured, expressing the fluid nature of reality. This related to Lynch’s belief in a unified consciousness that connects all things in a constant state of flux.

His swan song Twin Peaks: The Return (the final season, which aired in 2017) is marked by passing of time and ever-present spectre of death. Many of the series original cast had already died by the time the series aired.

Yet, for Lynch death was part of a “continuum”. He believed: “No one really dies, they just drop their physical body … we’re all going to be fine at the end of the story.”

From Mulholland Drive to Twin Peaks via Lost Highway: all David Lynch’s films and TV shows – ranked

Arts & Culture, Film & TV

12. Inland Empire (2006)It is one of life’s eternal mysteries that for the last two decades of his life, no one was willing to fund another feature by America’s greatest film-maker of the time. Almost as much of a mystery was his final completed feature: the evil twin of his previous film, Mulholland Drive. As Laura Dern’s hexed actor segues into the character she is playing, this digitally shot rampage down Hollywood’s boulevard of broken dreams dials up the narrative fragmentation of his late period. It runs the gamut from inspired camcorder surrealism to making-it-up-as-you-go-along incoherence (which is what it was: Lynch shot without a finished screenplay).View image in fullscreen11. Dune (1984)Even the great humiliation of Lynch’s career – butchered in the editing room and later disowned by the director – contains moments of genius. The Frank Herbert narrative comes across as though transcribed during a week-long spice bender. But what a ball the wunderkind, working with a big studio budget for the first time, clearly had with the visuals. The cuttlefish-like spice navigators, the wireframe forcefields, the mountainous tri-lipped Shai-Hulud: the baroque opulence puts the calculated corporate tastefulness of Denis Villeneuve’s version to shame. Sting in rubber Y-fronts gets our vote every time.10. Wild at Heart (1990)“Wild at heart and weird on top!” is something of a career motto. But this adaptation of Barry Gifford’s novel – made quickly alongside Twin Peaks – feels like Lynch’s most conventional work. Trading in the stock Americana of the road movie, Elvis and the Wizard of Oz, it struggles to transcend this iconography and reach the arresting strangeness that Lynch usually located so quickly. Maybe the one indelibly Lynchian moment is when Willem Dafoe’s obscene hoodlum Bobby Peru verbally assaults Laura Dern’s Lula – a scene which could have been unbelievably crass in the hands of a lesser film-maker. In Lynch’s, it is funny and shocking – and all the more shocking for being funny.View image in fullscreen9. Lost Highway (1997)Inspired by the psychological schism Lynch saw inside OJ Simpson, Lost Highway was the dry run for the innovative Möebius-strip narrative of Mulholland Drive. The film “flips” halfway through from Bill Pullman’s uxoricidal jazz saxophonist and Balthazar Getty’s chad of an autoshop worker, in such a way that it is not clear who is the fantasy or projection of whom. Structurally avantgarde and – especially when the unblinking Mystery Man is nearby – often highly unsettling, it is also possessed by a sordid single-mindedness that eventually wears you down.8. The Elephant Man (1980)Working as a hired hand for executive producer Mel Brooks, Lynch was in restrained mode, turning out what is akin to a genteel classic-era studio weepie. Rather than the technique, all the grotesqueness is entirely in the tale. Not in the disfigured John (Joseph) Merrick himself, played with supreme dignity by John Hurt, but in society’s reactions to him – even in the self-serving motives of his guardian Dr Treves (Anthony Hopkins, equally dazzling). If this was work-for-hire, it had a bravura guilelessness – culminating in the crushing final vision of Merrick’s mother reassuring him: “Nothing will die.” Words for the Lynch faithful right now.View image in fullscreen7. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)This prequel to the culture-shifting TV series underwent a 21st-century reappraisal as the debate around gender relations and sexual abuse intensified in the run-up to #MeToo. What seemed in the early 1990s like a self-harming refusal of the series’ winning quirkiness now seems ahead of its time and a striking feat of empathy on Lynch’s part. He fully inhabits the role of victim, as Laura Palmer courageously faces down her dark, incest-blighted destiny. But it can’t be denied, with the shining knight of the FBI’s Dale Cooper hardly in the picture, that it is unremittingly grim.View image in fullscreen6. Eraserhead (1977)Lynch began his feature career as he meant to go on: transmuting his deepest anxieties and phobias on to the screen with utter candidness. In this case, his fears of fatherhood – embodied in the lumpen homunculus that degrades while in the care of the film’s shock-haired protagonist Henry. Filmed painstakingly over five years, with jack-of-all-trades Lynch involved in every technical department, it was unmistakably the work of a singular sensibility, from the huis clos intensity and claustrophobic smokestack ambiance to the cast of hallucinatory entities such as the moon-faced lady who emerges from Henry’s radiator. The stubborn pacing and obtuseness only bolstered its midnight-movie credentials.5. The Straight Story (1999)Maybe the most Lynchian thing Lynch ever did was to follow up Lost Highway with this beguilingly normcore, sweet and immensely moving fable, based on a true story. Veteran Hollywood actor and former stuntman Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, a war veteran who made a 240-mile journey to see his estranged brother on a John Deere lawn tractor. This is where all those hours of transcendental meditation paid off for the director: slowed to a 5mph crawl, he wrings every drop of beauty and human goodness out of the midwest setting, as Straight’s journey decelerates into the sublime tranquility of its climax.View image in fullscreen4. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)The eighth episode – showing the original sin at Los Alamos which birthed the series’ demonic Killer Bob – is often cited as the greatest hour of prestige TV ever. Returning 25 years on, as Laura Palmer promised, Lynch and his co-creator Mark Frost met the sky-high expectations by confounding them. Flouting nostalgia by withholding Agent Cooper in his full glory until episode 16, turning David Bowie into a giant kettle, and aggressively disregarding TV conventions (two minutes of someone sweeping a bar-room floor, anyone?), it often felt closer to video art than primetime TV. But if this is now Lynch’s swansong, at least we got 18 unexpurgated hours of it. With the series’ manichean struggle extended out to New York, Texas and Las Vegas, Lynch gave us a requiem for a shattered, demoralised America, culminating in Kyle MacLachlan’s returning hero waking into his own nightmare on Laura Palmer’s front porch.3. Mulholland Drive (2001)Only the man whose Twin Peaks character’s moniker was Gordon Cole – the studio exec in the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard – understood and adored Hollywood enough to make what is arguably the greatest tribute to it ever made. This endlessly rewatchable noir mosaic, assembled from the shards of a failed TV project, is a surrealistic map to LA’s twin poles: the aspiration and the comedown, the infatuation and the jilting, the illusion and the disillusionment. As she plays PI with an amnesiac accomplice playing at being a femme fatale, Naomi Watts’s ingenue simultaneously gets increasingly adept in front of the camera: “This is the girl!” Aceing her audition, she seems to home in on the ineffable mysteries of performance and identity, and the soul of Los Angeles itself. Which of course are one and the same thing.View image in fullscreen2. Blue Velvet (1986)Choosing between Lynch’s two finest features is like choosing between cherry pie and doughnuts. But Blue Velvet edges it for me as the more personal and visceral of the two; his formative statement of violence and evil lurking behind white picket-fence banality, whose influence quietly bloomed in 90s independent film, art and comic books. Taking place in the director’s 1950s-tinged eternal present, it has an almost ritualistic force, as Kyle MacLachlan’s greenhorn student struggles to protect Isabella Rossellini’s lounge singer from Dennis Hopper’s nightmare hipster – but encounters his own dark side. The showpiece scene – “the eye of the duck”, as Lynch called such scenes – in which Hopper is undone by a rendition of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams demonstrates the director’s unmatched ability to use the stylised and surreal as a conductor for raw feeling.1. Twin Peaks S1 & 2 (1990-91)A damn fine cup of coffee. A girl wrapped in plastic. A log-carrying oracle. Grief expressed through novelty song. Thumbs up from Dale Cooper. Canada as the source of all corruption. Backwards talk from dwarves and dames. Traffic lights in the night. The leering demon behind the sofa. Like a fish in a percolator, the original Twin Peaks was where the Lynchian sensibility filtered irreversibly into the zeitgeist.View image in fullscreenAudiences had never seen anything like it: an ostensible homage to the comforts of daytime soap opera, none of it facile or ironic, but cut with Lynch’s habitual 1950s pop-culture references, dadaist skits and appalling sexual brutality. Not only did it expand the parameters of television but it amounted to the fullest and most seductive statement of the director’s worldview; his great American cosmology, in which the forces of good and evil warred for the souls of small-town prom queens and FBI agents alike.Yes, the second season dips badly after Laura Palmer’s killer is revealed, and Lynch was occupied with Wild at Heart and other things. But his collaborators’ flailing attempts to replicate Lynchian weirdness in his absence only served to highlight his inimitable talent for finding the offbeat route to overwhelming emotion. Every time the series called for revelatory violence or charged metaphysics (“It is happening again!”), he returned to the director’s chair and unfailingly delivered. Thanks for warning us about the Black Lodge, Mr Lynch – and see you in the White one.