ringing L. Ron Hubbard's sprawling 1,000-page novel Battlefield Earth to the big screen fulfills a long-standing dream for John Travolta. Travolta, whose performances in films as varied as Grease, Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty have won critical acclaim, also ventures into SF for the first time with Earth. Travolta originally wanted to play the hero, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, but that role went to Barry Pepper when Travolta decided he was too old for the part. Instead, Travolta plays the film's villain, the evil alien Terl. Battlefield Earth covers events in the first half of Hubbard's novel.
To bring Hubbard's massive narrative to life, Travolta hired director Roger Christian, who is no stranger to SF. Christian won an Oscar for set decoration on George Lucas' original Star Wars, worked with Lucas on Return of the Jedi and acted as the second-unit director on last year's Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.
The link between Travolta, Hubbard and the controversial Church of Scientology has dogged the film. Hubbard created the church, and Travolta is one of the its most famous adherents. Media speculation has gone so far as to suggest that the church is bankrolling the film and using it as a recruitment tool; Travolta and Warner Brothers, which is distributing the movie, have denied such connections.
Both Travolta and Christian took a minute last week to speak to Science Fiction Weekly about the issues surrounding the film.
Terl is about the most evil character I think I've ever seen on film.
Travolta: Isn't that true?
How does he compare with characters you've played before?
Travolta: The other evil guys I've played have been in Face/Off, Broken Arrow and Pulp Fiction. Those are the three most evil guys I've played. But nothing like Terl. Terl has no remorse, no guilt, no conscience at all. And I think that was interesting to play. But! He's an alien! He's nine feet tall, and he's wicked, and he's cool in a very new way. He's got his dreadlocks, and his amber eyes, and his talons for hands, and his bad teeth, and all that stuff all add to his kind of unusual, hip thing.
Is it true you compare Battlefield Earth to a Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction?
Travolta: I said it was like Pulp Fiction for the year 3000.
Because I thought that Pulp Fiction was entertaining, but it was very evil in a lot of ways. But more than any of it, it was very funny. And I tried to make it funny too. And in this movie, the book is very funny, so it wasn't as difficult to try to make this as funny, because it's a great comic villain, Terl is. So the combination just reminded me of Pulp Fiction a lot.
What can you tell us about any sequels in the works?
Travolta: The sequel is the second 500 pages of the book, and it's actually more intricate than the first 500 pages, which was more of a story than I think anyone's ever seen in a science fiction movie anyway before.
So this second part gets a little more involved with the rest of the world, and what's going to happen and all this sort of thing.
Do you have a title for the sequel?
Travolta: No. Other than, probably, Battlefield Earth: The Blank Blank Blank.
You'll start shooting it when?
Travolta: Probably the end of next year.
What do you think of claims that there are subliminal Scientology recruitment messages in Battlefield Earth?
Travolta: I think they're hilarious. Because the movie is so not about any of that. And I love the idea that there's even someone that suggested that. [Laughs] Because it never worked in the 1950s, so the idea that even someone would think it would work now cracks me up.
(Be warned: Christian also reveals a few big spoilers for the movie.)
Roger Christian, how did you go about picking what parts of Hubbard's book to put in and what to leave out of the film?
Christian: It was impossible to put the [entire] book in. As it is, it's ... really the first half of the book. ... We slightly changed the one [element], to give it an ending. We brought forward the destruction of the planet at the end there. ... And also, the book starts out--and it's really interesting to read--with Terl and Jonnie, the two main characters, feeling each other out. I knew we couldn't do that; it would become like a European art movie. So we condensed that. We had to add other characters, because in the book, Jonnie is ... very stoic. ... It's the hero's journey. It's the classical, mythological line of the hero, when you follow it right through the book. So he had to be the stoic, the one who would lead humanity. He always had to retain a dignity about him. So we also added in quite interesting characters around him to liven it up. It was ... [the] way that they did [things] with Star Wars, where Harrison [Ford] in a way was there as the kind of rebel alongside Luke Skywalker, who had to be that same kind of stoic hero as well.
How do you think Battlefield Earth will compare with The Phantom Menace, both in terms of story and in terms of how the audience will receive it?
Christian: [That's] a difficult one. ... I couldn't compare to it, obviously. ... It's the biggest franchise in the history of cinema, really.
And I think George [Lucas] has got a huge arc that he's telling. We showed it to George, actually, two nights ago, Travolta and I, with an audience at Skywalker [Ranch], and George loved it, and was grilling me for hours as to how we did the effects with the money I had.
But I think ... it's similar in the underpinnings of mythology and storytelling, which George is a stickler for, and which he congratulated me on, which I'm glad about, that we actually sold the story. But other than that, we are much more ... Travolta's word for it is "pulp science fiction." And that's what's coming back at us from all the press screenings and audiences everywhere, that this is like a kind of new science fiction for the millennium, so that, I think, is different. And I'm not bound [by] a tradition. He's got to now hold that tradition, because that's what it is. We're the rebels.
Have you signed on for the sequels?
Christian: We have. We are definitely doing [them]. ... I am looking at it now. And I'm just warning them that I don't think I can get it into one. So I think in effect we're going to have to have two. There's so much to come. The last half of the book is gigantic, and it's a necessary part of the revolution and a necessary part of the resolution of the whole of the saga. I think we're talking about shooting maybe late next year, the next one. But we're definitely doing it. [Battlefield Earth screenwriter] Corey [Mandell] is being commissioned to write it. And because we made the film for such a low budget [reportedly around $80 million], our costs are covered already. Whatever we do now is icing on the cake. So doing it this way means we can fulfill our dreams.
