Travolta's law

On a damp, sleepy Sunday morning in Dublin's Merrion Hotel, there's little apparent sign of glamour in the foyer, but, for those…

On a damp, sleepy Sunday morning in Dublin's Merrion Hotel, there's little apparent sign of glamour in the foyer, but, for those who can read them, the signs are clear - the journalists waiting in huddles, the flocks of PR people, the very large minders - it all says one thing: movie star in town. John Travolta has come to Ireland for the European leg of the promotional tour for his latest film, the legal drama, A Civil Action, and the media machine is in full swing. As he walks into the interview room, relaxed and casual in the kind of expensive, dark suit that has become as much of a trademark as the flared, white, three-piece was in the golden days of disco, he exudes the relaxed confidence of a man at the top of his game.

The Travolta story - from 1970s sex symbol through 1980s has-been, to his reinvention as a 1990s superstar, thanks in a large part to his casting by Quentin Tarantino as mobster Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction - is by now well-documented to the point of tedium. For the past three or four years, he has been riding the crest of a Hollywood wave, making four or five movies a year, and earning a reputed $20 million a pop for each one. The films themselves have ranged from the sublime (Get Shorty) to the bathetic (Phenomenon), a body of work which has tended to be most impressive when playing off Tarantino's inspired hunch that he would be perfect casting for characters whose moral ambiguities needed to be leavened with charm.

In A Civil Action, he plays an amoral personal injury lawyer who becomes caught up, against all his natural instincts, in a case taken by the citizens of a small Massachusetts town against the corporations whom they believe are responsible for poisoning their water supply and triggering a high incidence of leukaemia among their children. Written and directed by Steven Zaillian (who wrote Schindlers List and Mission Impossible), the film, based on the true story of Boston attorney Jan Schlichtmann, is unusual among big-budget courtroom dramas in its relatively realistic depiction of the legal process: there is little grandstanding to the jury, no dramatic last-minute twists, and the ending is ambiguous instead of triumphant.

"In America, it's the lawyers' favourite movie," says Travolta proudly. "Because it's told from their perspective. It's the most honest film about the way law works, and the way truth doesn't stand up in the system. And it's about the lower echelons, like the kind of ambulance chaser I play, versus the upper-end tactics, which equally lack credibility. It shows the way that truth sometimes comes out of all this, but that basically it's a mess."

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Travolta plays Schlichtmann as an arrogant, cynical narcissist, the worst kind of greedy, ambulance-chaser, but, as he acknowledges, it's not the first time he has been asked to play such characters.

"I didn't like Schlichtmann, and I wondered how the hell I was going to play him. But I didn't like the character I play in Pulp Fiction very much when I read it first, and I didn't really know how to play a lot of characters I've been offered, because people often ask me to solve unpleasant characters. When I first read Pulp Fiction I wondered how I could solve playing a heroin addict and a murderer, so I used humour. With this guy, I thought if I played a greedy, self-centred guy who was just unaware that he was that way, if I could really pull that off, maybe the audience would stay with it. These are the kinds of things you have to do if you're going to play unpleasant characters."

He based his own performance on a lawyer who had once represented him in a court case. "I watched for hours during his deposition, and I remember thinking, if I ever play a lawyer, I'll do it like he does. It was very stylish, very theatrical, a little pretentious, a little affected - unnecessary, really, but he obviously thought it was necessary."

A Civil Action feeds off the widespread popular distaste for the legal profession which can be found in many countries these days, but particularly in the US, Travolta acknowledges, although he believes it's not always justified. "I think leverage and blackmail is just criminal, but at the end of the day an ethical criminal lawyer, or one working pro bono for a cause they believe in, like the environment, can do a lot of good." His own interest in environmental issues stems from an incident a few years ago, when his young son nearly died from a rare condition called Kawasaki Syndrome after coming into contact with a carpet-cleaning fluid. "That was one of the worst moments of my life, and it really convinced me that these things do matter. We have to be more aware and more careful about the substances we introduce into our environment. Since then I've become involved with several environmental coalitions, campaigning on a lot of issues."

In refusing to take the classical courtroom drama route, Zaillian risked making a movie which people would find opaque or plain depressing. Not surprisingly, Paramount stepped in when test screenings played poorly to audiences. "Those first screenings were very emotionless," says Travolta. "None of the narration was in, and certain scenes were missing. It was kind of brilliant, but instead of a hundred million dollar movie, it would have been a 20 million dollar art movie if we left it like that, but if we fixed it with a little more dynamism, we knew we could get it out to more people. Steven went away and wrote all this voice-over narration, and we re-shot a couple of scenes. With something like Face/Off, you knew the minute you saw it that it was there already. With this, it took about six months of tweaking and changing. It's like clay - you can fix things to communicate better."

Travolta repeatedly mentions John Woo's Face/Off, the deliriously anti-realist action movie in which he co-starred with Nicolas Cage, as the best example of the kind of movie which he loves making, and which his current exalted status allows him to make. "I have better opportunities now to choose roles where I can explore my motives. It's important for me to have the freedom on a set to express myself. John Woo, interestingly enough, allows me to do that almost better than anyone. I'll come up with wild ideas and he'll find a way of making them work.

"In Face/Off my character hates the idea that his adversary has got his face, so I suggested I should get turned on by that, and lick Nic Cage's face. No other director would let you improvise something like that, in a standard, action-type picture, but John did. Quentin was good at allowing that freedom too, but Face/Off was like being on a high-wire every day. We both did things that we knew were over the top, but we had to go there. While we were shooting, I said to Joan Allen (who plays Travolta's wife in the movie) that this was either going to be the best action movie ever made or was going to be hilariously bad. Fortunately it was the latter."

This theme of freedom runs through his conversation, along with a self-deprecating assurance that he knows how to cope with the ups and downs of the movie business, despite some mistakes in the past. "California's a gold-diggers' paradise, and I've been pretty bad at judging people some of the time, but the smartest thing I ever did in Hollywood was that I never took rejection very seriously. If a movie I had chosen didn't do very well, I wasn't worried. If I wasn't the studios' first choice, that's just business. When Pulp Fiction came along, I understood why they wanted Daniel Day Lewis, they wanted Bruce, they wanted actors who were much hotter at that moment. I didn't take that personally. I said to Quentin: don't worry if you can't get me into this, because these guys have more value at the moment to the studio. So I was always pretty smart about that. It's the other stuff I wasn't smart about. I get a little blinded by people who are charming and brilliant, and I've suffered because of that."

Some might say that, in his co-starring real-life role (with Tom Cruise) as the movie business's best-known Scientologist, he still may not be surrounded by the best-intentioned people. "Well, there's eight million people who take it seriously around the world, so that's serious stuff. I've been involved with Scientology for 24 years, and it's saved my ass lots of times. I think that decent people respect other people's religion. The opinions of less decent people, who won't respect my beliefs, is not interesting to me anyway. But it's naive to think that any new religion will not have trouble surviving in the midst of more established religions."

There's a steeliness to that answer which doesn't often show up in Travolta's on-screen persona, but one of the merits of Zaillian's film is the way it plays against the star's amiable type at times. There are moments in A Civil Action when Travolta's trademark cheesy grin is used in a context that emphasises its falseness. "Steve is undercutting that perception of me," he agrees. "The toughest scene for me to do in this movie, but the best one to watch, is when I meet those townspeople and I'm just bored and rejecting them. I've never played a scene as cold as that unless I'm playing a psychotic, but never with a level-headed guy. It's cold but it's really effective."

I ask whether he was disappointed not to get an Oscar nomination this year for his uncanny impersonation of Bill Clinton in Primary Colors - the best thing by far in that film. "Well, I've been lucky enough to get two nominations in the past, but I've come to realise that the years that you're nominated it's important, the years that you're not, it's not. I've won six Golden Globes already, I was nominated this year for Primary Colors and I was sure that I'd win my seventh, but then Michael Caine wins it for Little Voice. When that happens to you, just get up there and enjoy it; when it doesn't, just drop it like a hot potato."

A Civil Action is on general release