John Travolta’s most memorable ‘Pulp Fiction’ moment: “I felt like I was in the zone”
When Pulp Fiction was released back in 1994, there was a genuine buzz, the likes of which you don’t often get about movies these days. Everybody wanted to see it, there was talk about the film being something genuinely different and that the young director Quentin Tarantino had made something truly groundbreaking. And there was also a lot of talk about John Travolta.
That was understandable, because Travolta in the early 1990s was a deeply unfashionable, cheesy, almost former movie star, big in the disco of the 1970s, cool in the early 1980s, but then practically disappearing, before reemerging as nothing less than a talking baby in Look Who’s Talking. It’s fair to say he was not someone you would expect to be adorning the bedroom walls of students in the year Oasis released Definitely Maybe.
But Tarantino, who was a fan of Travolta’s work in the 1981 Brian De Palma thriller Blow Out, had other ideas. He wanted the actor for a role opposite Samuel L Jackson as Vincent Vega, a hitman who would be integral to the film, but it was a part originally written for Reservoir Dogs’ Michael Madsen, and the film execs wanted a much bigger star involved, someone like Daniel Day-Lewis, who was coming off the back of a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar win.
But Tarantino was insistent that Travolta would bring the right amount of detached cool to the role that was required, even threatening not to make the film at all if he didn’t get his way. The studio finally fucking relented, and Travolta was hired, to the surprise of many. In the end, Travolta was a revelation in Pulp Fiction, earning an Academy Award nomination and featuring in some of the most memorable scenes in modern cinema history.
There are a few film fans who can’t recite moments like ‘Royale with Cheese’ or remember Marvin being shot in the face, and Travolta entering a posh apartment, wondering where everyone is, has now become one of the more recognisable memes/gifs on the internet, used for all manner of purposes. But which Pulp Fiction moment does Travolta himself remember the most fondly? Turns out it’s one of the best dance scenes in cinema.
“Well, there’s several,” he said. “But I think the whole day of Jack Rabbit Slims, sitting opposite Uma (Thurman). The whole set piece was another level for me. I felt like I was in the zone and I couldn’t make a mistake. It was just this thing that took over, you know?”
Adding, “So I would say that whole day, 12 hours of shooting, and I remember, Quentin said to me, ‘You know that you’ve entertained this set all day long. They’ve been captivated by what you’re doing.’ And I understood because I felt in a zone where I could just own the character and be the character. That’s probably my favourite memory.”
In recent years, Travolta has had to deal with personal tragedy, which has resulted in his stepping away from movies. But he made a return to lead roles last year with a heist movie called Cash Out, and repeated the trick this year with High Rollers. He now has no fewer than six new films in varying states of production, including one called That’s Amore alongside Christopher Walken, and brilliantly, one called ED, which is about a crash test dummy who turns sentient and seeks revenge for being put through so many car crashes.
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