Look who's talking - actor John Travolta - Interview

Interview, August, 1994 by Rosanna Arquette

We couldn't wait until fall, when Pulp Fiction will be released, to let you in on the talkiest, Tarantino-est experience of the year. So we armed one of its stars, Rosanna Arquette, with a tape recorder for an intimate tete-a-tete with its lead actor, her neighbor John Travolta

ROSANNA ARQUETTE: Hi, this is Rosanna Arquette, and I'm actually, ummm, lost. I'm looking for John Travolta's house. I live about thirty miles from him in Northern California. It is now 4:30 P.M., and we were supposed to meet at four o'clock. I called his house, and Kelly [Preston], his wife, was supposed to be coming to find me. She'll be in a chocolate-brown Rolls-Royce; that's what I'm looking out for as I sit parked across from a golf course listening to Sgt. Pepper on a sunny summer afternoon and waiting for Kelly to come rescue me [laughs] so we can start this interview. We're going to be discussing Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, the movie that John's starring in and I'm cameoing in. It should be very interesting.

later . . .

O.K. I've been rescued by the very adorable, beautiful Mrs. Travolta, who's barefoot and wearing a little hippie dress in the chocolate-brown Rolls-Royce. This is so surreal, I gotta tell ya. She's lost, too, that's what's so funny. There are winding, winding roads in this Northern California forest. Over and out.

later . . .

I'm with John Travolta now, and we are recording. John, I just wanted to tell you that when I was younger, I had a huge crush on you from watching Welcome Back, Kotter in the '70s. I'm sure everybody did. And my mother reminded me that when I was a kid, your sister, Ellen Travolta, was a very close friend of my family and I wanted her to be my godmother. So I knew you when we were kids and now we're both in Pulp Fiction. When I read the script and they said that you were doing it, I got really excited because I always thought you were a terrific actor. A lot of major actors wanted your role, but it was written for you. I know you took some time off to start a family and, you know, fly higher, but I'm really excited to see you back doing your thing.

JOHN TRAVOLTA: Yeah, it's a trade-off. Because if you choose not to work, a lot of people are more excited about you when you end up doing a big movie. But then you've had the discomfort of not working. And working makes an actor feel productive and happy.

RA: What do you think of Quentin as a director?

JT: I'd never known anybody who was so certain in what he wants and yet gives you the freedom to go down as many paths as you want. I liked that he's an actor as well as a writer-director, because I found myself trusting him. And he wasn't so self-absorbed with his script that he would be averse to changing things. I would say 90 percent of everything he wrote is in that movie, but there's 10 percent where he allowed any actor who felt uncomfortable to alter a line or whatever, as long as it was effective. For instance, if I had trouble with the way a line was structured, I'd say, "Do this line for me as an actor the way you would do it." And sometimes he'd say, "You know what? You're right. It doesn't work. I'm gonna change it." But it was a rare occasion that you'd ever want to change anything. I don't know how you felt, but I felt, "Wow, I really like being a film actor again."

RA: Do you think this is one of your best experiences as an actor?

JT: Totally. And I loved my experiences with Jim Bridges [Urban Cowboy, 1980], Brian De Palma [Blow Out, 1981], Robert Altman [The Dumb Waiter, 1987], and Amy Heckerling [Look Who's Talking, 1989]. Those were kind of the highlights, but Quentin has a little bit of all of them in him.

RA: How has it been for you living with the legacy of Saturday Night Fever [1977], which was such a huge movie around the world? There's a resurgence of that movie now in fashion and music. Does it haunt you?

JT: Only in a good way. The thing I like about it is that there's a generation now who can get an even bigger kick out of it, because the drug scene isn't so attached to that part of the culture. The people who were doing the Saturday Night Fever scene in the '70s were involved with cocaine and drinking so much that they may not even remember the era. [laughs]

RA: Were you ever into drugs?

JT: I was not into drugs, nor was I a drinker. But that was partly because I was studying Scientology. You see, in order to do certain courses you had to be straight, because it was illegal within the group to be high. And I liked the result of that better than I did the feeling of being high.

RA: I myself smoked a lot of pot in the '80s. I don't do anything now because I'm pregnant. [laughs] In fact, I'd already quit, but I definitely did my share.

JT: Yeah. But who didn't? The thing is, I was very alone in those days. In a way, I created several themes for people to party on--Saturday Night Fever, Grease [1978], Urban Cowboy--and people partied on those themes in a way that I never did. I loved those scenes, but I didn't like that some people chose to experience those scenes with drugs. Therefore I was an odd one out in some ways, observing a culture--the show-biz culture--and watching people hurt themselves. I could be totally wrong about this, but I think it's a cleaner scene right now.