Wes Anderson/Bill Murray
Number Of Films Together: 7 — “Rushmore” (1998), “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001), “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004), “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007), “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009), “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012), “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014)
History: Wes Anderson‘s another director who’s been steadily building an ever-growing repertory company over the years, but while the likes of Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman are undeniably associated with the filmmakers’ works, it’s Bill Murray who marks the defining relationship of the director’s career. Anderson, inspired by the work that the comic star had been doing in films like “Mad Dog and Glory” and “Ed Wood,” reluctantly approached Murray for his sophomore film, despite feeling that he didn’t have a shot. Anderson told Deadline, “I didn’t want to send him the script because I understood that it was futile, that he would not respond at all and that it would be impossible to get him.” Fortunately, the notoriously picky actor’s agent (back when he had one) had been a big fan of “Bottle Rocket,” passed the “Rushmore” script onto Murray, and the actor agreed to work for scale to play the besotted, regressing millionaire Herman Blume in the picture. The two got on famously—Murray even wrote a blank check to Anderson to fund a scene that was being cut for budgetary reasons—and Murray’s the only actor to have featured in every one of Anderson’s subsequent films. Sometimes it’s a significant part, sometimes a mere cameo (as with his clever framing appearances in “The Darjeeling Limited“), but an Anderson film simply wouldn’t be the same without Murray’s avuncular hangdog charms cropping up somewhere. Anderson’s been upfront about wanting to work with his regular collaborators, telling The Guardian last year “there’s an energy that comes from people who are friends. Whatever chemistry is on set is going to be there in the movie, and you want some electricity that you don’t really control.” And clearly, the two continue to be great friends, with Murray saying, self-deprecatingly, at a Cannes press conference “Sometimes, when you work with a director you know you not only may never see him again, sometimes you hope you never seen him again. And that goes for the director as well. They can’t wait for you to leave. They drive you to the airport to make sure you leave. That happens. With Wes, I’ve never gotten a ride to the airport. I’m just so happy with how Wes just gets better.” The two will be reunited once more on the upcoming “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
Key Film: “Rushmore” might be their finest hour together, but the defining Anderson/Murray film has to be “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” It’s arguably the director’s weakest, or at least most unruly and indulgent effort, but it’s the one that centers most on Murray’s character, an egotistical, self-absorbed marine biologist. And for all the film’s flaws, Murray gives a textured and, eventually, deeply moving performance as a selfish asshole who borders on being too irredeemable to like.
Pedro Almodóvar / Penélope Cruz
Number Of Films Together: 5 — “Live Flesh” (1997), “All About My Mother” (1999), “Volver” (2007), “Broken Embraces” (2009), “I’m So Excited” (2013)
History: Having fallen out with previous muse Carmen Maura in the early 1990s, there was certainly something of a void in the work of Pedro Almodóvar, one of the great directors of women of the modern age. Fortunately, soon after, the filmmaker watched Bigas Luna‘s “Jamon Jamon,” which starred a 17-year-old actress called Penélope Cruz. The actress had been a fan of his work since childhood (saying once, “He changed the way I looked at the world before I even knew him”), so an offer to audition was a dream came true, but he couldn’t initially find a role for her, telling The Guardian in 2009 that “She was always too young for my characters.” But after five years, the stars aligned, and briefly featured in 1997’s “Live Flesh” as a teenage prostitute who gives birth on a bus. Two years later, came a far more substantial part, as the young HIV-positive nun pregnant by the now-deceased Lola, in “All About My Mother.” The film was perhaps Almodóvar’s finest up to that point, and Cruz cemented the rising star status she’d had for a few years. Hollywood came calling, and so the two were separated for a few years, but they were soon reunited swiftly, for 2007’s “Volver” and 2009’s “Broken Embraces.” Cruz turned down the chance to star in Almodóvar’s “The Skin I Live In” in order to appear in “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” but there are clearly no hard feelings; she has a fun cameo in Almodóvar’s latest, “I’m So Excited!” The two clearly have an incredibly close bond—Almodóvar has discussed how the two had an almost sexual chemistry, telling GQ, “The desire was controllable in the sense that I don’t usually have sexual relationships with women. But we did both feel that the desire was present. Penélope was aware of it and we talked about it,” and describing their relationship to the Guardian as “a couple who don’t sleep together.” And Cruz is unrestrained in her praise for the director, saying, “In terms of personal experience, being in his films have been some of the best times in my life. Growing and learning. I don’t just see them as movies. I feel he could give his life for a movie, and so could I.”
Key Film: “Volver,” is still, in our minds, just about Almodóvar’s finest hour. Notably, the film also unites his two muses: Cruz and Carmen Maura, with whom he was reunited after eighteen years of estrangement. Maura’s terrific, but it’s very much Cruz’s film—for the first time, he wrote the role, of a woman who stabs her abusive husband who ends up accidentally opening a restaurant and seemingly encountering her mother’s ghost, specifically for the actress. He was right to do so; it’s still her greatest performance, and she shared Best Actress at Cannes with the rest of the ensemble, and was rightly Oscar nominated for the turn.
Paul Thomas Anderson/ Philip Seymour Hoffman
Number Of Films Together: 5 — “Hard Eight” (1996), “Boogie Nights” (1997), “Magnolia” (1999), “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002), “The Master” (2012)
History: Over his first few films, Paul Thomas Anderson built up something of a repertory company—John C Reilly, Philip Baker Hall, Melora Walters et al.—but the greatest constant across the director’s career has been Philip Seymour Hoffman. The theater veteran started out with a small role in “Hard Eight“/”Sydney,” but soon graduated to a scene-stealing turn in “Boogie Nights,” playing Scotty, the poor lovelorn boom operator in unrequited lust with Mark Wahlberg‘s Dirk Diggler; a funny and heartbreaking turn that’s one of the best things in the movie. Hoffman returned again to join the ensemble of “Magnolia,” with a very different turn, dedicated nurse Phil Pharma, a generous, unshowy performance that exists mostly to serve Jason Robards‘s titanic effort. Another change in direction followed with “Punch-Drunk Love,” in which Hoffman plays the mattress-store owning phone-sex line operator harrassing Adam Sandler‘s Barry, before the pair took a decade long break before reuniting for “The Master,” in which Hoffman finally took center stage with the title role. As Anderson says, that film was written for Hoffman, the director telling QuickFlix, “the biggest reason for this film, for me, was to make something with Phil that we built from the ground up. Like you said, we’d worked together before, and it was a couple weeks here, or ten days. It never felt satisfying enough. I wanted to work with him on a larger scale and in a deeper way. I would just start sharing pages with him and showing what I was up to. It was a great way to work.” The admiration is clearly mutual, with Hoffman saying that he enjoy both the director’s unpredictability, telling the New York Times, “Every time I work with him, I’m always surprised, he’s allowed himself to go further and not to always think he has the answer,” and his truthfulness, saying to Esquire, “I think Paul’s honest about who humans are. I think you gotta have an honesty and a humility about human nature and that it’s not about you at the end of the day. He knows what he’s good at. That’s the thing about Paul. And what he’s good at he’s better at than probably anybody.” Ultimately, though, Hoffman says their friendship is more important to him than their working relationship, telling Little White Lies last year, “I get concerned when we don’t talk for a few months, not when we don’t make a movie together for a few years. I make sure that we stay close as friends and that’s what we concern ourselves with. In his meanderings of trying to put stories and scripts together – because he writes all the time – if he comes upon something that he decides suits me then we’ll talk about it, but otherwise I’m not constantly looking to work with him. I’ve already worked with him enough for a lifetime, in a lot of ways. But I hope we keep working together, I hope I’m still a part of his stories. But if not then that’s okay.”
Key Film: Unquestionably “The Master,” last year’s extraordinary film that saw Hoffman as author/religion-founder Lancaster Dodd, one half of an unlikely friendship/platonic romance with Joaquin Phoenix‘s Freddy Quell. Hoffman might give his very best performance in the film, showing both the charisma of a self-appointed leader like Dodd, and more subtly, the flaws and weaknesses too.
Jeff Nichols / Michael Shannon
Number Of Films Together: 4 — “Shotgun Stories” (2007), “Take Shelter” (2011), “Mud” (2013), “Midnight Special” (2014)
History: It might be one of the youngest partnerships on the list, but Jeff Nichols and Michael Shannon have swiftly formed a potent cinematic partnership that we’re always happy to see more of, even if they’re only three films in (with a fourth on the way). The two first came together on Nichols’ debut “Shotgun Stories,” though interestingly, the director says that Shannon was the only person in the cast he didn’t know at the time, telling Indiewire back in the day, “The casting for this film was made up mostly of people I knew. Michael Shannon, our lead, was the one exception. I knew his work and had written the part for him, but I didn’t know him personally. I did however have a connection to him through a friend. This is how he got my script and eventually came on board.” But come on board he did, and the actor gives an unforgettable performance in the still-underseen 2008 picture as the appropriately-named Son, who instigates a feud with his half-brothers. The two became friends during the shoot, but interestingly, Nichols didn’t write the lead in his next film, “Take Shelter,” with Shannon in mind. The actor told Cinema Blend, “The first time I read the script was just as a friend. As Jeff was saying, it was a very personal story for him, and he just wanted someone to read it and see if it translated” before the director realized, as he says “at the end of the day, I happened to be friends with this amazing actor. I had his cell phone number.” Fortunately, the two did work together on that picture, as well as on Nichols’ follow-up “Mud,” in which Shannon has a smaller supporting role, but still proves to be one of the highlights of the picture. Shannon says that Nichols was nervous when they first worked together, telling In Contention “Jeff would do a lot of ‘What do you think we should do? Should we rehearse?’,” but adding that “we’ve always had a kind of unspoken understanding.” And with a fourth film on the way—a sci-fi film at Warner Bros. to co-star Joel Edgerton—the pair look to work together for a long time to come, Shannon joking to Cinema Blend, “As long as he keeps paying me more each time I work with him,” and Nichols promising “I’ll keep writing stuff for Mike and giving it to him.”
Key Film: It has to be “Take Shelter”—while the film’s not quite a one-man show (Jessica Chastain and Shea Whigham are also excellent in it), Shannon gives his very best turn to date as a family man who thinks he’s losing his grip on his sanity and is terrified at what that might mean for his wife and child.
