John Travolta on how Robert De Niro raised the bar for everyone: “He was setting new criteria”
For all his talents, John Travolta is rarely singled out for his acting prowess. Dancing? Sure. Hair? Absolutely. But emoting convincingly on-screen? Not so much. In truth, this has as much to do with the movies he’s chosen as the skill he brings to the table. He probably deserved those Oscar nominations for Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction. He almost certainly should have gotten one for Blow Out, but the likes of Phenomenon and Battlefield Earth quickly drowned out those performances.
That said, Travolta is an industry veteran with decades of impressive collaborations under his belt. In addition to Quentin Tarantino and Brian De Palma, he’s worked with Gene Hackman, Nora Ephron, Nicolas Cage, and Robin Williams. He is obviously well-versed in cinematic talent, but he had particular praise for one specific actor.
During an interview with the Huffington Post in 2014, the Grease star said that while he had “the great fortune of working with the best actors in the industry,” Robert De Niro holds a special place in his heart. “When I was starting out in movies, he was the challenge to live up to,” Travolta said, “Meaning he was setting new criteria for acting. He was raising the bar for all of us young actors, and that means if you were going to play a role, you had to really learn how to do the thing you were doing.”
If you’re playing a boxer or a saxophonist, he elaborated, you had to become one in real life. De Niro did both, competing in real boxing tournaments in Brooklyn to prepare for Raging Bull and learning the saxophone for three months to prepare for New York, New York.
Few actors aside from Daniel Day-Lewis have gone as far as De Niro has for roles, at least early in his career. Lately, however, the Raging Bull star has fallen into a similar trap as Travolta, undermining all his many accolades with mind-numbingly asinine work. How an actor can go from Taxi Driver and The Godfather to Dirty Grandpa and New Year’s Eve is something only dollar signs can explain.
Given their similarities and the younger actor’s reverence for his idol, it is grimly fitting that the first film in which Travolta and De Niro appeared together would be a stinker. Killing Season stars Travolta as a former Serbian soldier with a suspiciously wobbly accent who travels to America to exact revenge on a US veteran, played by De Niro, who shot him in the back during the Bosnian War.
Both actors offer some of the least engaging performances of their careers, though Travolta’s jet-black, geometric facial hair is quite mesmerising. It doesn’t come across in his accent or the script, but the actor followed De Niro’s lead when it came to preparing for the role, travelling to Bosnia and Croatia to gain a wider understanding of the legacy of the war. Most of all, however, he revelled in the chance to work with his co-star.
“He was a playmate that I wanted for years to improvise with, so it was a great, satisfying thing to create together,” he said, adding, “To be able to do this with him was a dream come true.”
At least there was a silver lining.
