15. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp first gained popularity for his TV role in ‘21 Jump Street’. He became famous in the movies after starting his work with Tim Burton in 1990’s ‘Edward Scissorhands’. This started a relationship so intertwined that it is hard to not mention the other when one’s name is mentioned. They went on to make some iconic movies like ‘Ed Wood’ and ‘Sweeny Todd’. Johnny Depp becomes the quirky actor that Tim Burton’s mad films need. Even in tamer adaptations like ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, their weird personalities come through. Their work on the animated ‘Corpse Bride’ is also commendable for showing a very different story that they make their own. Actually this mention would be incomplete without mentioning Helena Bonham Carter because she is just as important to Tim Burton as Depp. And the trio working together is a force not to be reckoned with as is evident from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ that made over a billion dollars. Everyone is waiting for their next collaboration.
14. Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L Jackson
Quentin Tarantino has worked with many stars in his career but one of them has become an integral part of the Tarantino universe. Samuel L Jackson auditioned for ‘Reservoir Dogs’ but didn’t get the part. Tarantino liked his performance though and wrote a character for him in ‘Pulp Fiction’, one of the best movies of all time. He has worked on every Tarantino film ever since, except ‘Death Proof’. Most of the parts that Samuel Jackson played were especially written for him. They went on to work again in ‘Jackie Brown’ and a short role in ‘Kill Bill Vol. 2’. Samuel L Jackson narrated ‘Inglorious Basterds’ and remains uncredited. He returned to a proper role in ‘Django Unchained’ as a house slave, in which he steals the show from the protagonist played by Jamie Foxx. In their most recent endeavour, Quentin Tarantino had Samuel L Jackson in the lead role as a bounty hunter in ‘The Hateful Eight’. Quentin Tarantino has been saying for years that he is only going to make 10 movies, so let’s hope that Samuel Jackson is also involved in two remaining films.
13. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio
Once De Niro got old to play the leading man’s part, Scorsese needed a new muse. And he got that in the form of a 26-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, whose fame had skyrocketed after the super-success of ‘Titanic’. DiCaprio didn’t want to do another Titantic — a film whose scale and success was so big that DiCaprio got sick of all the attention — so it was a perfect match for him as well. Both started working together with ‘Gangs of New York’, which also starred Daniel Day-Lewis. Even though the film wasn’t a big critical or commercial success, but it gave both of them enough confidence to keep making films together. Their next ‘The Aviator’ received a much better response and garnered multiple Oscar nominations and wins. Their third collaboration, ‘The Departed’, finally fetched Scorsese the long deserved Oscar. Their fourth film together was ‘Shutter Island’, which has become a cult hit in the thriller-loving circles. And finally, their most recent collaboration, ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, was yet another critical and commercial success.
12. Jean Pierre Melville and Alain Delon
Many people believe it was Coppola or Scorsese who breathed life back into the crime genre, but it was really Jean-Pierre Melville, one of the lesser discussed masters of the French New Wave who gave a distinct definition to gangsters, after the WW2. There was another figure, who made gangsters and “men of violence” appealing. I remember watching ‘Le Samourai’ for the first time, and I was left awestruck by each and every moment of his. The fedora, the trenchcoat, the flirting with shadows, Alain Delon became the quintessential admirable badman, the homme fatale. Though Le Samourai would completely be a Melville-Delon film, their best work together was the unparalleled heist movie, ‘Le Cercle Rouge’. This was the first time a heist movie was not simply made as a thriller, and Melville continued with his subtle themes of existentialism and solitude. Their last collaboration, ‘Un flic’, came out in 1972, the same year The Godfather did and this time Delon played a cop who explores Paris’s world of crime, a world that has since gone on to inspire directors like Guy Ritchie. What set Melville apart was his treatment and relationships between criminals and lawmen, and due to certain reasons these two set of characters were despised. By adding Delon, he made the characters intriguing and then proceeded to explore them.
11. Frederico Fellini and Marcelo Mastroianni
Frederico Fellini’s world lies somewhere between realism and surrealism, it possesses every emotion a real being would but also being more vivid than any work of fiction, some sort of a fantasy dreamed by a troubled mind. To work with an experimental director in an already contorting cinematic background is an arduous, but Marcello Mastroianni excelled under Fellini. He was another actor who had been discovered from the stage, and this proves the importance of theater in crafting an artist to perfection. I believe this experimental approach also gave Mastroianni the freedom to truly understand his characters while contributing to them, and this is clearly noticeable in the pair’s second collab ‘8½’, which is considered to be Fellini’s magnum opus. Their third collaboration came out after 17 years, and by this time though audiences couldn’t completely decipher his work, they respected it for its originality. ‘City of Women’ was followed by the not so successful ‘Ginger and Fred’ and ‘Intervista’ as Fellini became increasingly experimental with the structure of his films, the latter being a fictional docudrama.
