Quentin Tarantino has often shocked people with his casting choices, but looking back at his favorite movies explains the logic behind his decision-making. Although Tarantino is known as a brilliant auteur director and writer, his ability to bring great performances out of his actors is one of his most underrated traits.
The best performances in Tarantino movies show that the director has a knack for working with talent, and he’s also a visionary when it comes to casting. Some of his decisions raise eyebrows when they’re announced, but Tarantino is often proven right. Some of Tarantino’s best movies work because of his unexpected casting choices. Just think of relatively unknown actor Christoph Waltz bursting into Hollywood in Inglourious Basterds, or Pam Grier flipping her famous roles from the ’70s in Jackie Brown.
Tarantino has often spoken about his love of old movies, and this is also evident in his work. His love of film seems to have given him a keen intuition for casting, as he can always select the right actor based on an old role. This helps explain the reasoning behind his most surprising casting choice of all.
Blow Out Is One Of John Travolta’s Best Movies
Brian De Palma’s Tense Thriller Still Holds Up
In a handwritten list submitted to Empire Magazine back in 2008, Tarantino selected Blow Out as one of the greatest movies of all time. He initially penciled it in at number three, but he then indicated that it was interchangeable with Taxi Driver below it and Rio Bravo above it.
These three movies stand just below The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which Tarantino has often raved about. The fact that Tarantino is so fond of Blow Out could be why the director decided to cast John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, even when the actor was in a serious career slump.
Brian De Palma’s Blow Out demonstrates why the director has often been recognized as a disciple of Alfred Hitchcock. While De Palma’s artistic fingerprints are all over the film, with his famous split diopter sH๏τs and other hallmarks, the narrative could easily be a Hitchcock thriller.
John Travolta stars as a sound technician who witnesses a murder while trying to record ambient noise for a low-budget slasher. This sets up an exhilarating, twisty plot, with an ordinary man being pursued by shady political operatives while trying to seek justice. Blow Out is undoubtedly one of John Travolta’s best movies, and one of his best performances too.
Travolta is effortlessly charming as the laidback sound technician Jack Terri, but he also has the intensity to ramp things up as unseen enemies start to close in all around Jack and the mysterious woman who becomes the object of his affections. Despite the fact that the plot revolves around analog technologies, Blow Out has held up brilliantly over the years, and it can still deliver plenty of stylistic thrills over 40 years later.
How Pulp Fiction Changed Travolta’s Career
Travolta Struggled Before Pulp Fiction
When John Travolta first rose to fame in Hollywood, he was known for playing charming heroes, as he did in Saturday Night Fever and Grease. However, his career faltered throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, as he suffered a string of critical and commercial failures.
Even Blow Out was a box office disappointment, possibly because of its depressing ending. It wasn’t until Tarantino cast Travolta against type in Pulp Fiction that the actor returned to the spotlight. His performance as Vincent Vega earned him his second Oscar nomination, and it resurrected his career.
Immediately after Pulp Fiction, Travolta became a H๏τ commodity in Hollywood once again. He soon starred in plenty of successful movies, including Get Shorty, Broken Arrow and Face/Off.
He can thank Tarantino for this career renaissance, but he can also be grateful for his starring role in Blow Out 13 years earlier. Something in De Palma’s thriller must have convinced Tarantino that Travolta had the acting chops to play an emotionally detached ᴀssᴀssin. It’s hard to imagine anyone else alongside Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
