I don’t seem to have it bookmarked anymore, but I used to have a link that listed something like thirty different actor-director pairs (it was mostly actors, not actresses) that had worked together multiple times. It would be out of date now, of course, since most of the people involved have made more movies together if they’re still alive to do so. Though I have no doubt that, if Werner Herzog could make another movie with the shambling corpse of Klaus Kinski, he would. Many of these partnerships are praised repeatedly. So why are the others mocked?

It happens behind the camera, too, of course. I think it was while watching the 2005 Oscars that I noted that a lot of the people nominated for Munich were shown, in their behind-the-scenes clips, wearing Jurassic Park hats and so forth. It seems that Steven Spielberg, among others, finds qualified people and works with them. Or at least people he finds qualified and likes working with, which is what matters to him, I’m sure.

Akira Kurosawa directed Toshirô Mifune sixteen times. Tim Burton has so far directed Johnny Depp half that number of times. Yet any time either Burton or Depp get brought up, there’s a joke that the other will necessarily be there. Indeed, Tim Burton won’t even be directing the Alice in Wonderland sequel, but he’s getting blamed for it nonetheless. He’ll be a producer, but I’m not sure how much work he’ll be putting into it.

It’s very odd. I think most people would prefer to work only with people they believe will be helpful to what they’re trying to do. If you know that there are people who would do exactly the job you want, and you can decide to hire them, wouldn’t you? Sometimes, they’re more visible than others, but if you have people you know are good at their jobs, you would naturally gravitate toward them.

Okay, pairings aren’t always great. As it happens, I don’t much care for several of the fourteen films John Ford and John Wayne made together. And, yeah, Dark Shadows is not a good film. But would it have been a better film if it had starred someone else or been directed by someone else? The problems with the movie were deeper than that. Script-level. So maybe Tim Burton and Seth Grahame-Smith are the problem? But then, you have to believe that it would have been a better movie directed by someone else, or something. It seems to me that a whole bunch of people screwed that up, and I don’t think any specific pairing was the problem.

I suppose an argument can be made that these things are echo chambers. That a new person might feel better suited to stop things and say, “Wait, this doesn’t make sense.” Or “This isn’t very good.” Or something. However, that strikes me as missing a lot of the weight that’s behind the making of any given film. I don’t think a single person can stop the avalanche, as it were. Do I think that sometimes, they’re egging one another on instead of acting as brakes? Absolutely. I like to think that someone other than Gore Verbinski might have made Johnny Depp take off the bird hat in The Lone Ranger. Someone who didn’t know him as well. But neither of them made the thing.

I think even we who love film forget, sometimes, how big the process of making a movie, in particular a Hollywood blockbuster, can be. It isn’t just the star and the director. We seldom, for example, consider producers when we look at pairings like this, and producers have a major role to play. Was it George Cukor’s choice to direct Katharine Hepburn five times, or was that a product of the studio system? Probably it’s both, given how contracts worked in those days. But we don’t talk about the studio as part of the pairing.

Sometimes, a pairing can feed into a mutual madness. Look at Herzog and Kinski, after all; would it have surprised anyone who knew about them if one man had eventually killed the other? But there are also six movies out of that mutual madness, and I think there is a power there that neither quite achieved working with anyone else. Or take John Goodman—I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him be bad in anything, though I’ve seen him wasted in things, and yet there’s a little something extra there when he works with the Coen brothers, as he has six times. And I say that as someone who doesn’t much care for The Big Lebowski.