The Together Issue

prodige, was mostly interested in spending as much time as possible on his yacht. They clashed constantly. Bogart felt the most comfortable with Huston in the director’s chair because he pushed him to go beyond himself (and also because both men had a strong inclination towards booze), but he couldn’t bear the director’s time consuming work method that kept him from home, once calling Huston a “bastard,” who had been “dicking around” long enough.

With a battery of anecdotes that fill entire books and, in Herzog’s and Kinski’s case, documentaries, the repulsive attraction model has a smaller output but is more infamous.

Attraction and rejection, fascination and dedication, adoration and self-abandonment are the ingredients for the muse model, a model that is also extraordinarily fruitful. Consider, for example, Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith who, between 1912 and 1922, made 42 films together.

And what would Woody Allen’s career look like without Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, or, more recently, Scarlett Johansson?

A number of these pairings could be described as father-daughter relations of sorts, when the directors discover their muse at a young age, and teach them everything they need to know in order to give the performances the director needs from them. This was the case with Gish and Griffith, but also with Joseph von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, who made 8 pictures together. Dietrich wrote about von Sternberg in her autobiography that he was her “father, critic and instructor”, concluding: “He created me.”

One could say that in the same way, Jean-Luc Godard created Anna Karina who would become the poster girl of the French New Wave. Having seen her in a soap commercial, he was impressed enough to offer her a small role in what would become the most influential film of the Nouvelle Vague, A bout de souffle.

But Karina turned down the offer because the part demanded nudity. In 1960, Go-