This Friday, the Cannes festival presented, by surprise, an honorary Palme d’Or to actor John Travolta, who, very excited, said that for him this award is “more than an Oscar.” “I can’t believe it, you told me it would be a special night, but I didn’t know it would be for this,” he said, completely surprised to the general delegate of Cannes, Thierry Frémaux, who presented him with the award.
The protagonist of films like Grease o Pulp Fiction He added: “The films I have loved most in my life have always won the Palme d’Or.” Travolta recalled that when he spoke to Frémaux in November about his directorial debut with Come Fly with Me (which premieres May 29 on Apple TV) he didn’t even have hopes that Cannes would accept the film. However, he finally included it in the Cannes Premiere. Thus, the actor arrived this Friday to present it with his daughter, Ella Bleu, who participates as an actress in the film. The film adapts a novel published by Travolta in 1997 in which he tells of his love for aviation.
The film is inspired by Travolta’s childhood memories, such as his first airplane flight, to experiences he has accumulated and people he has met, in a nostalgic trip set in the golden age of aviation. A hobby that has led him to accumulate 9,000 hours of flying and that has even allowed him to fly airplanes in two films, look who’s talking (1989) y nuclear alarm (1996).
“As a child, he loved watching planes take off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, near his home. He started flying when he was only 15, obtained his first pilot’s license at 22 and, since then, has achieved numerous certifications as a pilot,” noted the French competition when it announced Travolta’s participation in Cannes.
In Travolta’s directorial debut, Clark Shotwell plays the young aviation enthusiast, while the role of his mother, with whom he embarks on a one-way adventure to Los Angeles, is played by Kelly Eviston-Quinnett. While Ella Bleu Travolta and Olga Hoffmann play the flight attendants that the mother and son have to take to make an endless trip full of stopovers.
This is the second Palme d’Or of Honor that the festival has awarded this year, after being collected at the opening ceremony by the New Zealand director Peter Jackson, and there is still a third, for Barbra Streisand, at the closing gala.