John Travolta: Heroic Role Model

Once upon a celluloid time, John Travolta was on every girl's wall in that white ice cream suit with one hand poised in the air...the poster from Saturday Night Fever. He was one of the first mega-hotties. Then, after Urban Cowboy, John sort of disappeared for a while and re-emerged in Pulp Fiction as a whole other animal. Sexy still, sure but with a mature and very edgy twist. Since his great success in that film, the friendly actor has made his mark as a character actor; a bad guy often but now, as the captain in the heroic firefighter film Ladder 49, he's back as he started, a good guy fighting against the odds.

John, who is a pilot and jets everywhere, often with his family and actress wife Kelly Preston, lives in L.A. and just took a limo ride and a walk into our interview room where he casually sipped a coffee and was happy to chat about "Ladder", a film of which he is extraordinarily proud. He also told us that his co-star Joaquin Phoenix, as a kid, wanted his autograph, the star pulled a big prank on him on set and John was worried about doing a lot of his performance alone with only a walkie-talkie.

TeenHollywood: You and Joaquin [Phoenix] had a wonderful rapport in this movie. He said you flew in and immediately went to the fire Academy and to a fire with him.

John: That's not necessarily unusual because of my experience flying my planes, I go to school three times a year, so I'm used to emergencies and dangers being thrown at me. So it's not something that I really had trepidation about, although I learned.

TeenHollywood: But firefighting training has to be pretty tough.

John: That's right, and we all learned the hard way, but it was really worth it and I think it enabled us to get it right for them, because they are a very unusual group of people. I think a very modest, humble group. They're not the squeaky wheel, so they don't get a lot of attention, and I think September 11th was the first time they were kind of revealed. This may be the first film that really pays attention to them that way.

TeenHollywood: What about the movie Backdraft?

John: Except that was about the arsonist. It's a very different angle, they didn't trust the firefighters. That had a gimmick.

TeenHollywood: Did you base your character on anybody you met at the Academy?

John: Yeah, I did a little bit. Lieutenant Mark Yant, he was my hero. He was a revelation because I didn't know what we were going to do, and one day there's this bubbly man who is standing by. These three guys are explaining something that took about an hour and I still didn't get it, and I said to him, 'Can you summarize that for me?' And he did it in one minute. He's a Lieutenant (in Baltimore) and he was amazing. So he became our real personal trainer and real confidante and mentor, and all these great things throughout the movie.

TeenHollywood: Has he seen the film?

John: Oh yeah. He's in a little scene. He's in the blueprint scene, where he's saying, 'Okay, the guy's here, if we break through this wall we can get there.' That's Mark. He just bawled and just was so proud.

TeenHollywood: Did you ever feel you were in danger, getting too close to the fire?

John: That whole rat scene. There's a scene where we put out quite a serious fire in an apartment, and that was a long few days with lots of fire and lots of heat and then of course, all the training was filled with danger.

TeenHollywood: Did you ever get a feeling why a guy (or gal) wants to be a firefighter?

John: I know exactly why. I asked several of them. They don't have a choice, it's not in them. They couldn't live with themselves if they didn't go in when they could have, and that's really the answer to that, and there's a kind of human being that is like that. They're an interesting group of guys because they're very naturally masculine and macho, but there's a humanity that seeps through them which gives you a nice balance of what a person should be like in that job. They have to be apt, physically strong enough, but their care-factor has to be high enough to put another first, before themselves. It's an important part of their psyche.

TeenHollywood: Why were there no women in your firehouse in Baltimore?

John: It is more male in Baltimore, but when I went to Chicago and Detroit there were two female firefighters in Chicago and one in Detroit, in Atlanta there was one, and then there was one in Dallas. But it was beautiful to watch because they're all equal, they had no issues with a woman doing the job. As long as they're capable of doing it, they were respectful, which wouldn't surprise me. Of all the professions that wouldn't surprise me that they would be gracious in that area, because they have that humanity.

TeenHollywood: Your character is such a great mentor to Joaquin's character. In real life has there been any young actor that you've taken under your wing?

John: Well whenever I work with younger people I try to enlighten them with the things that I've learned over the years, and Joaquin was no different. I'm the only person he ever wanted an autograph from as a child, he got Urban Cowboy, and he never asked for another one after that. I was it. His mother worked at NBC and I guess she knew someone at Paramount and they got that photo for him, and that was really cute that he did that.

TeenHollywood: When did he tell you about that?

John: Later. It was after we finished working together. But I already have a natural parental feeling toward him anyway. He's a very vulnerable guy, it's hard not to. But all the guys I felt very strongly about like Robert Patrick, I just adore him.

TeenHollywood: We're hearing about some firehouse and on-set pranks you guys pulled. Any stories for us?

John: The ultimate prank was pulled on me. I really want people to be on time and I want them to know their lines, and I'm a little anal about getting the work done for the day and doing it well. The worst joke you can play on me is if someone was not up to par. So [director] Jay Russell comes to me with anger and tears in his eyes, he's a good actor, and he says, (whispers) 'I don't know what to do, this boy has shown up and he is out of it. He's talking to himself,' and I said, 'Who?' and he said, 'Joaquin.' And I said, 'That can't be so.' I rehearsed with him, I fought fires with him, and suddenly – I said, 'Maybe he's freaked out because it's the first day.' (John does an hilarious impression of Joaquin coming on the set looking around like a space cadet). I said, 'Are you ready to do the scene?' And I start the scene, and he goes, 'Look at that sunset,' I'm like, 'F--k, we're not going to make it.' Finally after 10 minutes of this awful joke I'm told that they're kidding and the only reason I liked it is that there was craftsmanship in the joke. There was some art to it.

TeenHollywood: Besides you and your loved ones, what would you take out of a burning building?

John: Just that. There's nothing in the material world that is that [important]. Other than family, the thing that worries me most is papers. It can goof up your life. I'd think 'get the will, get the deeds, the rights.' Those would scare me the most about not having.

TeenHollywood; How difficult was it to act just talking on a walkie-talkie, as you have to do for much of the film?

John: That is the most challenging part of the whole movie, because it could so easily be 'one Adam twelve' or 'emergency'. When I read it I thought, 'oh God, oh man! How do I make that real?' So what they did was they said 'look, to make it seem like something we've not seen before, we're going to add reality to it,' so they had the burning building, they had Joaquin off-camera on a walkie talkie with me. They added the faces of the guys coming out [of the fire], and all of that added to the life of it to some degree. So it was probably the most difficult part for me.

TeenHollywood: Talking to everyone today, it seems like all of you actors bonded just like the guys in a real firehouse.

John: They wanted us to bond. Jay picked the kind of actors that really are like firemen; all kind of naturally macho, but there's a humanity in their presence that is undeniable. I find that firefighters have that. They're generous, and I could see them easily putting their ego on the doorstep and seeing them diving into this kind of thing easily and well.

TeenHollywood: Who were your heroes growing up?

John: Well, airline pilots were mine. I like airplanes. I grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood so firefighters were a natural, but it was a little more romantic to see those planes go across the sky, you know, where are they going, what are they doing, who's on board, where are we going to go next? So there's that, but in acting, I loved Jimmy Cagney, he was a hero of mine.

TeenHollywood: How did the production of the film change after September 11th?

John: Only to the degree of getting it right, because the firefighters were in the limelight now and their courage was unquestionable. Their integrity was unquestionable, and now it was 'are you going to live up to that and get it right or not?' That was mostly the demand. The ball was in our court, kind of.

TeenHollywood: On another film. Don't you have a dance scene with Uma Thurman in Be Cool, the sequel to Get Shorty?

John: I haven't seen it yet, but I was told it is awesome. I take full responsibility for that dance because I grew up in the '60s when there was a certain Brazilian feeling in the air, you know, Stan Getz and Jobim would fill the air on jazz stations and I associated that with a lot of good times as a kid. The director and Uma thought I was crazy. They said 'why would you pick a samba to dance?' and I said 'because it's really classic, it's really elegant and it's timeless', She asks if I can dance, and as Chili Palmer I say, 'I'm from Brooklyn. Of course I can dance.' And we do this very cool kind of homage. I know that it probably came off well.

TeenHollywood: Do you have anything coming up after that?

John: Yeah I do. A movie called A Love Song for Bobby Long, and that got a tremendous acclaim at the Venice Film Festival. Scarlett Johansson is in it with me, and Gabriel Macht. I'm an old professor, an English professor, and he's a student I've kind of mentored, and Scarlett comes into our lives. It's really well-executed, I thought.

TeenHollywood: Are you keeping to your fitness regime?

John: I've been trying to. It's not easy. I don't like that we have to exercise, I really don't. Why can't we grow old gracefully? It does help. It makes you feel better and all of that stuff. I was the oldest guy, [at the fire academy] it was probably the only thing that helped me make it. I've always been a natural athlete. It's just that it's a pain in the ass.

TeenHollywood: Did you learn anything as a result of your training?

John: Yes. I learned that different buildings and different furnishings and accoutrement lead to different kinds of fires, and different ways of putting them out. Like for instance, a kitchen fire is the most dangerous because of the nylon materials that the pans and things are made of. When you inhale them, they solidify in your chest and you can't make it, so you have to be protected. That's why when they see a burning frying pan they say 'whoa, masks,' and they put it out with a certain chemical because if you steam it up, the particles get in the air and you breathe it in. You know, interesting stuff that will save your life.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainemnt journalist and produced screenwriter.