John Travolta was already in love with planes before he’d turned five years old. Living in New Jersey, his family home was close to Newark, JFK and LaGuardia airports and, “by the time the planes took off, they were maybe 2000 feet above my house,” the actor recalls. “They were loud in those days, so you could hear the planes coming and leaving, and I would wonder who’s on it, what’s it like to fly?”
At 22, before Grease and Saturday Night Fever made him a star, he acquired a pilot’s licence. One night in the early 90s he was grounded in Maine, due to fog, stuck in a hotel until the morning. As he lay awake, childhood memories flooded back. “By the time we left to go airborne again, I had the story in my mind.” In 1997 he published his children’s book Propeller One-Way Night Coach, a story of a boy’s first plane ride.
The night before, in an emotional moment, he was given an honorary Palme by the festival. “I had no idea that was happening,” he says. “I swear on my children’s life.” He glances in the direction of his daughter, Ella Bleu Travolta, sitting alongside him. The 26-year-old features in the film as Doris, a flight attendant, as seen through the eyes of Jeff (debut actor Clark Shotwell), the eight-year-old accompanying his mother Helen (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) on his first airborne adventure, aboard a TWA propeller-driven plane.
The aviation bug extends to Ella, who, like her father was introduced to the joy of planes at a young age. “I love this movie in particular,” she says, “because it shows the romance of how [flying] used to be, and that’s always how my dad has made it for me, or how I viewed it growing up. And I know it’s very different nowadays. Even just the fact of dressing up to go fly… I really love that aspect of it.”
Narrated by Travolta, this fictionalised childhood memoir also has enormous personal resonance for the 72-year-old star. For example, Jeff’s mother in the film has the same name as Travolta’s own matriarch Helen, a former actress and singer. “She had great taste and she knew that the wealthy people sold their used clothing at the church basement, so she could get a Christian Dior or Chanel for very little money,” he recalls. “So, at 12, I was in Christian Dior suits that cost $10 because they were someone else’s hand-me-down. So, we had a lot of style, our family, but not the money.”
With the film marking Travolta’s return to public life after the sad passing of his wife Kelly Preston from breast cancer in 2020, he touchingly dedicates the film to her, as well as his mother, father, brothers, sisters and children Ella, Ben and lastly Jett, who tragically died of a seizure when he was 16. “Those are the people that are my blueprint for my life,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here sitting with you today if it weren’t for them. They created the inspiration. I stepped on their shoulders to have my vision.”
Talking of which, Travolta piloted his own private jet to Cannes, even serving the film team chicken cordon bleu as a nod to the movie. “I’ve designed it where I do the exciting parts of flying, like taking off and landing, and then when it gets boring up there, I go back and eat.”
And after successfully landing his debut in Cannes, will he direct again? “I don’t know, because this was so special. I would have to be equally inspired, because then it’s not a job.”
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