It is not uncommon in Hollywood to find a director and an actor who work together once, only to become inseparable after. For instance, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro have become an iconic duo through their frequent collaborations. The same is true for Wes Anderson and Bill Murray, as well as brothers Sam and Ted Raimi.
Get Out, Us and Nope director Jordan Peele appears to be developing a similar relationship with Daniel Kaluuya. The MCU star has played leading roles in two of the director’s three feature films so far. With their professional relationship starting to blossom, Peele even once referred to the actor as his very own De Niro.
Celebrated director Quentin Tarantino has written and directed only nine films in the course of his 30-year-old career. As things stand, he is planning on working on his 10th, after which he intends to call time on his directorial profession.
The breadth of Tarantino’s body of work makes it hard for him to have one of those enduring partnerships with an actor, but there are those he has worked with on a number of occasions.
Is Brad Pitt Quentin Tarantino’s Most Frequent Collaborator?
Brad Pitt has starred in a Quentin Tarantino film two times. This places a number of other actors ahead of him in the list of the director’s most frequent collaborators. Samuel L. Jackson is at the top of that list, having worked with Tarantino in seven different films.
Born in March 1963, Tarantino lied about his age and worked as an usher in an adult film theater in the early 1980s. He went on to do a number of different jobs, before he finally broke into Hollywood towards the end of the decade.
After he wrote and directed his first movie by the title Reservoir Dogs in 1992, the filmmaker’s script for the romantic crime motion picture True Romance was directed by Tony Scott in the following year. It was here that his and Jackson’s paths crossed.
The pair reunited in 1994 for Pulp Fiction, before going on to collaborate in Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Volume 2, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Uma Thurman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tim Roth and Kurt Russell have also featured more than Pitt in movies that were both written and directed by Tarantino.
Brad Pitt And Quentin Tarantino Also First Worked Together In True Romance
Like Samuel L. Jackson, Brad Pitt got to work with Quentin Tarantino very early on in the director’s career. He, too, was part of the cast of True Romance. The film is about “a lonely pop culture fan [who] falls in love with a call girl and accidentally takes drugs from her pimp,” according to IMDb.
“The two go on the run to Los Angeles to sell the drugs and live happily ever after. Only they don't know that [the] Sicilian mafia and LAPD are after the drugs.” The leading roles in the movie were played by Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette as Clarence Worley and Alabama Whitman respectively.
Jackson featured as Don “Big Don”, while Pitt played a character called Floyd, a roommate to Michael Rapaport’s Dick Ritchie. It was more than one and a half decades, though, before the 12 Monkeys star worked with Tarantino again.
Pitt reunited with Tarantino in 2008, as they filmed Inglourious Basterds, and then again just about a decade later, for Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
Quentin Tarantino Reserves Very High Praise For Brad Pitt
Quentin Tarantino has previously intimated that he is not the easiest boss to work for, saying, “I don't have time to f*** around… If I got a problem with you, you're fired.” Those who have worked with him multiple times prove that he, nonetheless, has a lighter side to him as well.
This side was in full display when he recently spoke glowingly about his experience working with Brad Pitt. GQ Magazine ran a profile on the actor in June this year, as part of which they asked Tarantino to share his thoughts on what it was like to work with him.
“The thing that only the directors that work with Brad and the actors that act opposite him really know, what he’s so incredibly talented at, is his ability to really understand the scene,” Tarantino said. “He might not be able to articulate it, but he has an instinctive understanding about it.”
The director also compared Pitt to older-time Hollywood stars, saying: “He’s one of the last remaining big-screen movie stars. It’s just a different breed of man. And frankly, I don’t think you can describe exactly what that is, because it’s like describing starshine.”