Add Propeller One-Way Night Coach to your watchlist

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.

Travolta has now brought that childhood story to our screens, making his directorial debut in a charming love letter to the golden age of aviation. We’re in Cannes, where he’s sporting a natty cream beret as the film is unveiled at the film festival before a global release on Apple TV. The festival will always hold a special place in Travolta’s heart. On the wall in the hotel room where we meet, hangs a black-and-white image of Uma Thurman, his co-star from Pulp Fiction, the film that won Cannes’ Palme d’Or and made Travolta cool again.

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.

‘I like doing the exciting parts, like taking off and landing. Then I go and eat’

Ella has worked with her father before, in the 2019 thriller Eye for an Eye, but here seems ideally suited to the Mad Men-era vibe (the film is set in 1962). “Her presence in this movie… to me, it’s A Star Is Born,” says Travolta, admiringly. “It’s just magnificent, and I loved designing shots to present her to the world in a way that was how you would with Audrey Hepburn or how you would with Elizabeth Taylor or Grace Kelly… and she lives up to it.”

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.”

Unquestionably, it’s nostalgia that powers Propeller like jet fuel, from the serving of meals like chicken cordon bleu (a running gag in the film) to the fact you could smoke on planes back in the day. “It’s a bizarre thing,” says Travolta, “but when I was little, the mix of the smell of cigatette smoke and chicken cordon bleu made me know I was on a plane and I love the mix of smoke and food together, because that’s everything: your home, planes, busses, cars… it was part of the era.”

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.”

He also calls Propeller… a “homage to cinema”, with the film featuring snatches of music from classic movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “I’ve always felt that the golden age of cinema used music better than we’re using it today,” he says. And of course, it wouldn’t be a 1960s-set film without a blast from Frank Sinatra crooning Come Fly with Me.

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.”