It's good to have friends, someone you can trust and who will lend you a hand. In Hollywood, it's more essential -- and far more difficult -- to have friends. Nearly every relationship is based around money and ego, and no two people alive can ever agree on how much of either is enough. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, however, have so far bucked this trend. They first met at the Toronto Film Festival, each attending with his feature debut, Tarantino with Reservoir Dogs and Rodriguez with El Mariachi. It's no surprise that with each helming a groundbreaking, low-budget action film, they found something in common.

They became fast friends, and it wasn't long before they began to work together. Tarantino, nursing his cherished acting ambitions, appeared in a small role in Rodriguez's Desperado (1995), allowing himself to be killed in a toilet stall. Later the same year, the pair teamed up with Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell (two more golden children of Sundance) for the ill-fated anthology film Four Rooms (1995). It's generally agreed that Rodriguez's segment is the only one that's even remotely watchable, while Tarantino's -- a flat ripoff of an "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" episode -- is the worst.


Next up came their most fruitful collaboration, with Rodriguez directing an older script of Tarantino's, From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), and Tarantino giving his least annoying performance as the slightly dim brother of a cool criminal (George Clooney). The film is notable for starting out as a vintage Tarantino crime caper, but suddenly turning into an every-man-for-himself vampire film. This led to more projects together, notably in the feature-length making-of documentary Full Tilt Boogie (1997), directed by Sarah Kelly. The pair also produced two straight-to-video sequels, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999) and From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter (2000).

Next up, Rodriguez provided music for the second half of Tarantino's magnificent, sprawling Kill Bill; Tarantino credited Rodriguez as "My Brother." From there, the pair proved inseparable; Rodriguez invited Tarantino to be a "guest director," helming one sequence (starring Clive Owen and Benicio Del Toro) in Rodriguez's film Sin City (2005). And coming this week we have another anthology film, Grindhouse, with Tarantino and Rodriguez each writing and directing their own 80-minute feature under the Grindhouse umbrella. (The pair has also provided comments for another documentary, Dead On: The Life and Cinema of George A. Romero, hopefully to be released next year.)

It would appear to be a perfect match, but is this a symbiotic relationship, or a parasitic one? Hardly anyone would argue that Tarantino is by far the more talented of the two filmmakers; one look at Rodriguez's creepy "family" film The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D (2005) confirms it. Moreover, it's not a stretch to argue that Rodriguez's best films to date are the ones that Tarantino was involved in (From Dusk Till Dawn and Sin City), and that Tarantino's least interesting films are -- for the most part -- the ones that Rodriguez was involved in.

Still this is hardly a case of Rodriguez leeching from Tarantino or diluting his talent. Rather, it's a case of brains meeting brawn. Tarantino has the brawn; he's the one that delivers the truly inventive, astonishing images. He's the one that can take a fight scene, stretch it out to impossible lengths, fill it with quiet spaces and make it seem new. But Tarantino is also lazy, arrogant and misguided. Left to control his own career, he'd most likely never finish another film. How often has he boasted to reporters about some project he'd like to do, such as his Chinese-language martial arts film, his Pulp Fiction/Reservoir Dogs prequel The Vega Brothers, his idea to film Casino Royale as the next James Bond film (done, of course, without his involvement), or his on-again/off-again war film Inglorious Bastards?

His first four screenplays (Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction) were all produced within the space of two years, but in the thirteen years following, he has only directed two more features (Jackie Brown and Kill Bill) and now Grindhouse. Probably he gets impatient with the long, slow filmmaking process and his exciting new ideas eventually lose their appeal. On top of that, he wasted a great deal of time by indulging far too often in his misguided attempt at an acting career (Destiny Turns on the Radio, Girl 6, Little Nicky, etc.).

Rodriguez, however, is the brains. One look at his "10 Minute Film School" featurettes on his DVDs shows that he's extremely savvy about cutting corners and saving money; he's like a modern-day Roger Corman, but one that doesn't sacrifice quality. Additionally, anyone who can make a no-budget action movie in Spanish and sell it to a major studio has to have some kind of head for business. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to suggest that it's Rodriguez keeping Tarantino on track, forcing him to work and to follow through with his ideas. Grindhouse strikes one as an idea cooked up late at night over beers; Tarantino probably would have forgot it or shoved it to the back burner with a hundred other ideas, but Rodriguez most likely started the ball rolling.

It's tempting to compare this friendship to another current one, Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron, but in that case, both filmmakers seem to be on equal footing. No, the Tarantino/Rodriguez club is closer to one shared by the late Orson Welles and John Huston. The two men probably met when Huston wrote the screenplay (without credit) for Welles' The Stranger (1946). But after that, it was Huston who gave Welles a number of acting and writing jobs, which no doubt helped finance Welles' own films. Without Huston, we can only speculate how many Welles masterworks might have fallen through.

I'm not comparing Tarantino to Welles, but they are similar in one way: their overwhelming creativity and lack of business skills caused them to leave many, many projects unrealized. It's likely that these men would not completely trust a purebred businessman to handle their affairs, and so they put their trust in a peer, a colleague that understands the ups and downs of the business, what it's like to direct actors, to sit behind the camera and to make decisions. Huston and Rodriguez certainly contributed some good films of their own, but their greater -- perhaps immeasurable -- achievements involved their choice of friends and the quality of their friendship.