Ahead of Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese's sixth collaboration, recounting other great cinematic partnerships

Already considered to be one of the better modern-day actor-director collaborations, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will soon partner for the sixth time, which is perhaps the average for most all-time great partnerships. The duo is reuniting once again to adapt the book The Devil in the White City, that is based on the true story of HH Holmes, a doctor and a serial killer during the constructions of Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1983.

Most collaborations, that extend over films and across the years, usually happen as they are mutually beneficial. As it is essentially a visual art, films need someone to embody the filmmaker’s vision and someone to bring to life. The two most distinctive kinds of collaborations are between the director and the cinematographer and the one between the filmmaker and an actor. Ingmar Bergman-Sven Nykvist did 20 films over three decades, or Raj Kapoor and Radhu Karmakar, who shot all the former’s films, from Awaara (1951) to Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985).

If one were to take out the great Toshirō Mifune from Akira Kurosawa’s films (they did 16 films together in 17 years), the master’s oeuvre would be very different. Try imagining Stray Dog (1949), Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), The Lower Depths (1957), Yojimbo (1961), High and Low (1963) and Red Beard (1965) with someone else. Similarly, it is difficult to think what some of Bergman’s greatest films, including The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966), The Passion of Anna (1969) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) be without constant collaborator Bibi Andersson.

Scorsese is also known for his onscreen partnership with Robert De Niro and in fact, their association, that spans over 10 films, includes many masterpieces of American cinema. Beginning with Mean Streets (1973), the two have worked on at least one seminal film across three decades - Taxi Driver (1975), The Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990). At the turn of the century, Scorsese finally got a chance to make The Gangs of New York (2002), a film he had been chasing for decades, and through it began a collaboration that will now reach a point where it could be considered as crucial as his work with De Niro.

Although many had noticed DiCaprio’s potential, it was not until he began working with Scorsese that he came to be seen as a contemporary great. Since they began to work together, it is largely the films that they have worked together that seem to bring the best out of them. In DiCaprio’s case, his bravura performances in The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) stunned the critics and audiences alike, while Scorsese finally won his Best Director Oscar, that had eluded him on several occasions for The Departed. Interestingly enough, since they first worked, the only films that Scorsese has directed without DiCaprio are Hugo (2011) and Silence (2016).

The new Scorsese-DiCaprio film is called Killers of the Flower Moon and is also historical in a manner of speaking. The true account of the series of murders that the film follows is one of the first major investigations undertaken by the FBI in the United States. One reason DiCaprio gels well with Scorsese is the manner in which he seems to ease into the roles that would have suited a young De Niro. For long, Scorsese and De Niro had been considered each other’s alter egos and since Casino (1995), which was the last film that they did together, the absence of an alter ego in Scorsese’s films had become conspicuous. The two films that Scorsese made in between his association with De Niro and DiCaprio - Kundun (1997) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) - stick out in his filmography. The former was a biopic of the Dalai Lama and the latter was Taxi Driver redux, thanks to writer Paul Schrader, who also wrote Taxi Driver. Finally, when DiCaprio landed the role of Amsterdam Vallon, which incidentally was  De Niro’s suggestion , that Scorsese seemed to have found his groove. The film was originally planned in the late 1970s with  De Niro playing Bill ‘The Butcher’ Cutting , the role which eventually featured Daniel Day-Lewis.

The filmmaker has concentrated more on the documentary format in the recent past, but with The Irishman slated to release the next year, he would reunite with not just De Niro but also Joe Pesci, and would also work with Al Pacino for the first time. One of the rare filmmakers from the 1970s to be as prolific today as he was nearly five decades ago, Scorsese is exploring a George Washington biopic and who knows that would be the next time ‘Scorsese-DiCaprio’ project.