The only John Travolta movie Quentin Tarantino never wants to see: “I couldn’t bring myself to watch”
If any cinephile has one actor they hold in higher esteem than everyone else to call their favourite, then it stands to reason they’d make a point of watching every movie they’ve ever been in. Quentin Tarantino literally built a shrine to John Travolta, but there was still one obstacle he refused to cross.
The filmmaker is credited with single-handedly resurrecting his idol’s career, which is pretty much exactly what happened. Travolta was one of the biggest stars of his era, but a string of poor choices and bad movies had seen his stock plummet drastically by the early 1990s.
In a combination of inspired casting and wish-fulfilment, Tarantino blew the cobwebs off Travolta’s stagnant filmography and steered him back towards the top of Hollywood by casting him in the Academy Award-nominated role of Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. The actor was back among the A-list, and the person who put him there got to work with someone they’d idolised for decades.
The first time Tarantino met Travolta, the pair played board games that were based on Travolta’s back catalogue of credits. With that in mind, never mind the shrine that the writer and director had created, it goes without saying the auteur was among the most devoted of Travolta’s superfans.
And yet, even he had his limits. Tarantino is famed for being a voracious consumer of as many films as possible, trawling through obscurities and unheralded gems to develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of the medium. As his favourite actor, it would make perfect sense for him to be a Travolta completionist, although he couldn’t bring himself to sit through one film in particular.
“As much as I like John Travolta, I couldn’t bring myself to watch some fucking talking baby movie,” he told Vanity Fair. “But I’ve seen everything else he’s done.” Tarantino had persevered with the highs and lows of the star’s credits during a decades-long adoration for his work, only to stop short of subjecting himself to Amy Heckerling’s 1989 comedy Look Who’s Talking.
That put him firmly in the minority, though, after it left theatres as the second highest-grossing release of Travolta’s entire career, behind only Grease. Paying customers were clearly desperate to see the actor co-starring with Kirstie Alley and an infant voiced by his future Pulp Fiction co-star Bruce Willis, but Tarantino wanted nothing to do with it.
On the plus side, he dodged a bullet by avoiding Look Who’s Talking in the event he felt compelled to check out the sequels. The second instalment earned less than half as much as its predecessor and was slammed by critics, while the third chapter was an unmitigated disaster that tanked spectacularly and couldn’t scrape a glowing review together to save its life.
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