Leonardo DiCaprio has tended to pick up the reputation of the actor’s actor nowadays. While he may be one of the most recognisable faces in the world of cinema, he has never been afraid to embrace something weird if he thinks that it will impact an audience in just the right way, whether that’s working as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street or eating some of the most grotesque things in the world while turning in time on The Revenant. But after years of giving one brilliant performance after another, DiCaprio admitted one of his best moments came working opposite Al Pacino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Then again, anyone who has ever worked with Al Pacino before probably has the memories of those days burned into their minds. Pacino has seemed to be viewed as an iconic figure for the past four decades at this point, and outside of a few notably questionable moments (see: Jack and Jill), he has rarely shown up for a film where he wasn’t in rare form.

But his role as an executive looking up DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton as a potential money maker feels more like a power move by Quentin Tarantino than anything else. Tarantino was already an icon by the time he started working on his ninth film, but it’s one thing to get extraordinary actors and then have someone as iconic as Scarface fade into the background of the movie.

That’s the entire point of the movie, though. The premise of the film was supposed to be a love letter to the kind of Hollywood that seemed to be slipping away in the modern age, and putting in Pacino could have been a subtle piece of commentary that even the most glamorous stars of yesteryear can be virtually a faceless person in Tinseltown.

Still, that didn’t stop DiCaprio from taking in every minute with Pacino, telling BBC Radio 1, “Al and I got to rehearse for that scene for quite a few weeks. A lot of it was taken out, but to sit and talk about the industry with Al Pacino was one of the highlights of my career. It was incredible to work with someone who has the ability to light up a scene like that and to go toe-to-toe with him was unforgettable.”

That unforgettable scene is just a blip on the radar of what Tarantino had in store for his modern masterpiece. Despite having his signature style throughout the film, this is the kind of movie where the Pulp Fiction director can soak in all of the magic and the danger of pop culture’s most enduring city, as DiCaprio’s Dalton tries desperately to hang on to his relevance as everyone turns their back on him.

In fact, there’s a good chance that DiCaprio might have taken a few cues from Pacino in terms of riding the wave of success. Since Pacino had rarely had a time when he wasn’t looked at as a historical figure in film, it’s hard not to see Dalton as a number of any potential movie stars that have found themselves behind the times and struggling to find their way back into the limelight.

The storyline might be a bit bleak for anyone entering the film industry for the first time, but it wasn’t a case of DiCaprio foreshadowing the future of rising stars. This was his turn to become a Hollywood elder statesman, and swapping lines with Pacino and holding his own showed the world they were looking at a seasoned pro at work.