by Paul Fischer
by Paul Fischer
With four movies droppig
this year, John Travolta continues
to enjoy a life which is now past fifty, and he's having a ball doing
it. As As Howard Saint, in the adaptation of the Marvel comic book 
The
Punisher, he plays a character is murdered in cold blookd. At
the behest of his adoring wife, he swears revenge on the killer and the
family of the killer and unleashed a swath-of-blood punishment that .
. . uh . . . waitasec . . . Travolta plays the bad guy in The Punisher,
though all that print about murder and revenge still applies. Still to
come this year is a reprise of his wonderful role as Chili Palmer in
the forthcoming Get
Shorty sequel, Be
Cool,
plus other roles he describes to our man in LA.
CrankyCritic: Was it important that this villain be more
serious than some of your more comic villains like in "Broken Arrow"?
Travolta: I think the key here is the more serious he was, the funnier he
became. I wasn't sure I was going to play this until the last minute
because I had to see what Thomas Jane was doing and the rest of the cast.
When I found out they were playing it dead serious, and that was pretty
funny, I thought, 'Okay. I'm gonna play it subtle and serious
and it will be funny'. It's funny because most comic strip
movies think they have to do the other and the more we played it like
we were in a Scorsese movie, the funnier it became.
CrankyCritic: You do believe that your character is out to avenge his son and you
can identify with him at first.
Travolta: You can?
CrankyCritic: His wife was the bad guy.
Travolta: Yes. This is a very interesting point. I think that the brilliance
of the movie is that the two have the same button pushed in the opening
and you go 'oh my God, I understand this but where's the
dilemma? Who is going to be the real enemy here?' I do agree that
the wife takes it- - He's just happy with tit for tat, get the
guy who killed my son, end. She's the one who just can't
stand the idea that it's not going to be everything to make her
feel better. Of course, when you get to know her character more, you
realize everything is very lustful in her life so it carries through.
CrankyCritic: The casting of you and Laura was great.
Travolta: I did too. I liked that. That's Jonathan's fully,
his idea. He just wanted a very sexy relationship. He wanted my character
to be obsessed with her. My character is obsessed with her differently
than the Punisher is obsessed with his family. His is kind of a healthy
obsession with his family and mine's kind of a possession obsession,
you know. But they do push the same buttons in each family but from different
levels. One is the high road and one the low road.
CrankyCritic: Howard Saint, your character in The
Punisher, doesn't come from the comic books?
Travolta: No. This is a new character. I had to ask a lot of
questions about him because there wasn't anything to base him on. I
had to come up with an original. I thought, 'Well, if I play it over
the top, how do I do it?' And I kind of had this idea of kind of a
Spidery villain that was really funny and almost grotesque in a way.
Then it was whittled away. The way I was playing it was not where we
were going with it. I'm just showing up for a very serious performance
here.
CrankyCritic: So, how are you dealing with being
50?
Travolta: Slowly I turn, step by step.
CrankyCritic: You had a big party.
Travolta: Well, us baby boomers, unfortunately have this eternal-
- really, I've known from the time I was a kid. We're the largest group
of people on the planet and we will not let it go! It's like 'older?
Middle-aged? No!' It's really amazing.
CrankyCritic: What was the party like?
Travolta: It was amazing. Where do I start? It was a true surprise.
I did ask my wife a year ago, I wanted a big party but then I decided
quickly that the logistics would be way too much so I decided that I
would not want the big party. So she fooled me for a year with lies and
deception. My God, the dunce cap got bigger and bigger. 'I wonder why
all these corporate planes are here? It's more than I've ever seen. It
must be that golf tournament'. There were three hundred people waiting
in the lobby and I'm thinking it's employees. I said 'See? Look. There
are no free rides. Those two free rooms and the jet ride down here, we
didn't need it and now we're gonna sign autographs and take pictures
with all these employees the whole weekend'. Then I see Barbra Streisand
and Oprah walk toward me. 'What are they doing here?' I think somewhere
I perceived that something big was going on but she kept fooling
me with saying 'Oh, you're going to be so disappointed. You think
anything big is happening because I got a couple of people for you?.
I tried.'
CrankyCritic: You are doing Be Cool, a sequel
to Get Shorty, right now. What is generally your take on sequels?
Travolta: I don't particularly care for sequels however, Elmore
Leonard wrote the book "Be Cool" and then when you start to make
a whole new unit and that much time and effort to make something that
good, I think it takes on a whole other life. It's a wonderful script
and a great cast. And, you don't get these people to do sequels. You
don't get Uma and Harvey Keitel and Vince Vaughn to do these kinds
of things so you know that it has to be high end script. And it's based
on Elmore's very good sequel book. The opening line of the movie is
'Sequels. Chili Palmer is fed up with them. The sequel that he did
in the movie "Get Shorty" didn't work so he'd fed up with sequels'.
So it's very hip.
CrankyCritic: What did you learn from Staying Alive and
the Look Who's Talking sequels?
Travolta: It's not that you learn anything. Usually it's just
a studio's efforts to cash in on the success of the first thing and again,
the difference is that Elmore Leonard really put his- - he loves- - It's
his favorite, so he wanted to make Get Shorty continue. He thought
the best way to do it is to write another book about Chili Palmer. And
that I preferred, that someone else made the first step as opposed to
a studio. And eight years or nine have gone by so a lot has evolved.
Mostly, Elmore Leonard doing his homework. That's the only way it's fun
to do one of these things. Otherwise, I don't particularly care about
it.
CrankyCritic: But we won't see the Renee Russo or Gene Hackman
characters?
Travolta: They aren't referred to because [Chili]'s moving out
of the movie industry. He's looking for a new horizon. He stumbles upon
the music industry, which is far funnier than the movie industry.
CrankyCritic: What do you think about all the studios
making comic book movies?
Travolta: Well, certainly Marvel comics has an audience out
there. They really want to see these stories come to life. I think
that you need a basis for stories and a library of material to entertain
and the kids want it so I think it's a good idea.
CrankyCritic: Had your son, Jett, read The Punisher?
Travolta: Jett's friends are older and they all had read The Punisher.
So that's how I knew about it.
CrankyCritic: How about you as a kid?
Travolta: I wasn't a comic book person. I was lip syncing to records
and things.
CrankyCritic: Tom Jane, who stars in the title role,
sees a correlation between The Punisher and action films of the
'70's.
Travolta: He sure did. He really took it further. I think he
did, in this film, what Clint Eastwood and Bronson and McQueen wanted
to do. He just played it to the best of his acting ability. I was more
of an art film guy. Even all the films I do don't represent the kind
of films I liked growing up. She's So Lovely probably represents
the closest thing. Other than Yankee Doodle Dandy or La Strada and A
Man and a Woman and Going Places. That was our era too.
I came from a Beatnik house so that's what [I] appreciate. My sensibilities
about what I like are. You can't ask me about mainstream films. I'm
more of another kind of, you know, playing jazz.
CrankyCritic: What is your fascination for these
tough crime lord guys, Gabriel Shear in Swordfish and Howard Saint
in The Punisher? Are they just really fun to play?
Travolta: Oh definitely. The lateral movement you have on this
is tremendous. It frees you up completely. Not at first, because it
has to kind of controlled. But by the time he starts getting paranoid,
then the fun begins. Because, since Joan Crawford and Bette Davis,
honestly, nobody has been able to walk down staircases like I get to
in this movie. Let's face it. In the first one, I come down to kill
my best friend; it's down a staircase talking about some historic character
and the second one is throwing all her luggage…boom! And then
that big staircase and I'm saying all these mean things. It's a blast.
CrankyCritic: At what point does playing such grandiose
characters become tiring and you want to retreat to doing films like
She's So Lovely?
Travolta: But I do. This summer I have a film called Love
Song for Bobby Long which is exactly my kind of film. Probably only
five people will see it but it's a wonderful art film with Scarlett
Johansson. It's a great little film.
CrankyCritic: Is there are point at which you can't
play a scene chewing character?
Travolta: No. I did Ladder 49 where I play a captain
of a fire department and he's dead, blue collar real and fun to play.
I
change up as much as I can. This year, all these four films are as
different as they can be. The Punisher's very different than Bobby
Long. Bobby Long's very different from Ladder 49 and the sequel to
Get Shorty is different as well.
CrankyCritic: Tell us about Ladder
49 . . .
Travolta: Oh, it's a brilliant movie. It's a really breathtaking
film. It's the best firefighter film that's ever been made and I'm
not even exaggerating. It's set in Baltimore and
Joaquin Phoenix plays the young guy in it and I'm really his
mentor in it. The main story is about him. It's a beautiful movie.
It's more along the lines of Apollo 13, by
far the best homage to the firefighters.
CrankyCritic: Do you still have hopes to do the
second half of Battlefield Earth?
Travolta: I don't know. It did well but it would really depend
on they wanted to do it. They have the rights to it. It would be up
to them really to do it. Warner Bros. Doesn't have the rights, it's
Elie Samaha. It would be up to him.
