The directors Margot Robbie has always wanted to work with: “I could watch their films a thousand times”
Margot Robbie has risen to the uppermost reaches of the Hollywood pyramid with unparalleled speed and precision. For an actor in her early 30s, she has already accomplished a head-spinning number of feats, including landing three Oscar nominations and founding one of the most successful actor-led production companies in the business.
It’s been just over a decade since her breakout role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and Robbie has barely put a foot wrong. She’s even managed to avoid having her career overshadowed by her involvement in a superhero franchise, something that even actors with much longer careers have not managed to do. With a strategic sense of the roles she takes on and a razor-sharp attention to detail as a producer, Robbie has managed to have a career that actors with three times the number of acting credits would be desperate for.
Choosing the right projects has been a key part in Robbie’s success, so it’s no surprise that when FilmInk asked her way back in 2016 whether there were any filmmakers she was hoping to work with, the I, Tonya star had a ready answer.
“My absolute dream top three is Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and The Coen Brothers,” she said. “I could watch their films a thousand times. They’re the top three on my bucket list.”
It is a testament to her proactiveness that she managed to tick one of those directors off the list within three years. Just after Tarantino finished writing the script for Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, he received a perfectly timed letter from Robbie in which she expressed her desire to collaborate with him. As it happened, she was the perfect fit for the role of the late Sharon Tate and received glowing reviews for her performance.
“One of the luckiest things that happened to me in the course of making the movie was to make it right now and have Margot out there,” Tarantino said later.
As for Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers, it’s easy to imagine Robbie fitting perfectly into their respective filmographies. The only trouble is that Anderson makes movies only every few years, and the Coen brothers haven’t made a movie together since 2018. She is not on the cast list for Anderson’s upcoming film, One Battle After Another, and the long-awaited reunion between the Coens is expected to be a horror movie. There is no information about the cast yet, but there is no reason to assume Robbie will be part of it.
Eight years after sharing her collaboration goals, it would be interesting to hear Robbie revise her list. She’s worked with some of the most exciting and highly-regarded filmmakers in that time, including Greta Gerwig, Damian Chazelle, and Wes Anderson, and is set to appear in films from Emerald Fennell and Kogonada. In the FilmInk interview, she revealed that she and her managers established three pillars of her career from day one – quality, diversity, and longevity.
“The smaller, in-between goals are obviously to work with great filmmakers,” she said. If that’s the case, then Robbie has already achieved the overarching aim of her career, even if a few stray pieces of her in-between goals are yet to be realised.
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