It’s only the first month of 2025, and many well-known filmmakers have passed away. Compared with American director David Lynch, French director Bertrand Brillet and British actor Joan Plowright, French director Jeannot Szwarc, who has been shooting in Hollywood for a long time, is probably inferior in terms of film industry status and award-winning resume. However, he, who passed away on January 15 due to illness, also shot several popular commercial films in the 1970s and 1980s, such as "Jaws 2" and "Supergirl", which can be said to be sequels to big IPs, and the classic romance "A Time Traveler" was once popular all over the world.
Ginotte Zwark
Ginotte Szwarc was born on November 21, 1939 in a Polish-Jewish family in Paris, France. Before he was old enough to understand, he followed his family to escape the clutches of the Nazis and fled to South America. After World War II, he returned to Paris and successfully obtained a diploma in business administration from the HEC Paris. While in college, he founded a film club, watched all kinds of movies crazily, and also taught himself how to make movies. Before graduating from college, Szwarc had already taken jobs from advertising companies to shoot commercial short films.
In 1962, Universal Pictures came to Paris to film the film "Charades" starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Familiar with the local environment, Zwark joined the crew and became a production assistant, which was his first close contact with Hollywood movies. At this time, the "New Wave" film movement was in full swing in the French film industry, but Zwark chose a completely different creative path. "I don't think I'm a film artist, I prefer to think that directing is a craft." He later confided in an interview. In 1964, he had a special liking for Hollywood commercial films, so he traveled across the ocean to Los Angeles, USA, and began to pursue his dream of making movies.
However, it was not easy for a 25-year-old Parisian who was unfamiliar with the place to make his way into Hollywood. "That experience was terrible. I did all kinds of odd jobs, such as writing lines for potato chip commercials and dubbing canned laughter for sitcoms. After more than two years of fooling around like this, I finally realized that this path was not going to work and that a director contract would never fall on my head," he recalled later.
Since he couldn't direct movies, Zwark decided to start as a TV director. In 1967, he directed the first season of the detective series "Invincible Iron Man" at Universal Pictures Television, thus starting his career as a TV director for more than half a century. In the 1970s, he participated in the directing of popular series such as "Detective Columbo"; for today's middle-aged audiences, the more familiar TV works he participated in should include "Ally McBeal", "Smallville", "Cold Case", "Boston Legal", "Bones", "Heroes", "Fringe", "Supernatural", "Scandal", etc. However, for a long time, the creation of American TV series has been centered on the so-called creators, and the selection of directors is like a stream of water, but it is not taken seriously. Fortunately, after shooting more TV series, with the accumulation of experience and resume, Zwark's dream of becoming a movie director finally came true one day.
The 1975 film "Jaws" came out of nowhere, creating the concept of the so-called summer blockbuster commercial film, and completely rewriting the history of Hollywood and even the global film market. Universal Pictures wanted to shoot a sequel immediately, but director Spielberg had no intention of doing so, so they asked John Hancock to take over. Hancock's wife Dorothy Tristan was a screenwriter and participated in the script revision of "Jaws 2". Shortly after the filming began, several forces including the senior executives of Universal Pictures and the film's star Lorraine Gary had a dispute, and director Hancock eventually became a victim. Against this background, Zwark was appointed to take over the director's work. According to him, this was the most difficult situation in the history of Universal Pictures. "They had spent $10 million on "Jaws 2", but fired the director three months after the filming began, and all the content that had been filmed was overturned."
Stills from Jaws 2
After the release of Jaws 2, the media reviews were not ideal. Everyone felt that it was not as exciting as the first one, but its North American box office still reached $187 million, making Universal Pictures profitable. Szwarc also thought he did a good job. "After all, I was able to make it under very difficult conditions. I knew from the beginning that this would not be a masterpiece in film history. I just knew that it had to be scary and completed on time."
Soon after, Universal Pictures decided to bring Richard Matheson's best-selling novel Bid Time Return to the screen, and Zwark was chosen to direct it. The film Bid Time Return, based on the novel, stars Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, and tells a romantic love story that travels through time and space. The film was released during the Screen Actors Guild strike, which greatly affected the publicity and led to poor box office results. However, as time went by, the film's fan base grew, especially the soundtrack composed by John Barry for the film, which is hailed as one of the most successful soundtracks in Hollywood history.
Ginotte Szwarc and Jane Seymour on the set of "Back in Time 70 Years"
Back then, "Back in Time 70 Years" also set off a movie-watching craze in Hong Kong, my country. It was shown in the luxurious and elegant Belle Palace Cinema in Causeway Bay (now demolished and converted into the World Trade Center Mall) from September 12, 1981, and was screened for 223 consecutive days before being taken off the shelves, setting a record for the longest continuous screening of a Hong Kong movie that year. It also made "Back in Time 70 Years" the highest-grossing foreign film in Hong Kong in 1982. Even Adam Cheng's Cantonese cover song "As in a Dream" adapted from the theme song of the film became a hit.
Stills from "Back in Time 70 Years"
Christopher Reeve, the star of "A Step Back in Time", had a good personal relationship with Zwark, which gave him the opportunity to direct "Supergirl". The film is a spin-off of the 1978 "Superman". It was originally planned to tell the story of Supergirl Kara going to Earth to rescue Superman, but in the end, the plot was forced to change because Reeve withdrew. In the end, this comic IP work failed to achieve commercial success, and the supporting actors and actresses Peter O'Toole and Faye Dunaway were even nominated for the Golden Raspberry Awards.
Stills from Supergirl
The box office failures of "Back in Time" and "Supergirl" prevented Genoet Szwarc from making further advances, and he returned to television, directing several episodes of the current season of "Grey's Anatomy" in 2019 at the age of 80.
