Ron Howard has been working in the entertainment industry since he was a small child, and he’s successfully transitioned from a child star to an adult actor to an Academy Award-winning director. In all his decades working on film sets, however, one experience stands out from all the rest.

In 1976, Howard starred in the movie The Shootist alongside the legendary actor John Wayne. At the time, neither of them knew that this would be Wayne’s final movie.

"My most useful acting tip came from my pal John Wayne. ‘Talk low, talk slow, and don't say too much’" – Ron Howard on working with Duke on his last film, The Shootist (1976) pic.twitter.com/MNyOXiie2S

— John Wayne Official (@JohnDukeWayne) August 3, 2020

In a recent interview, Howard opened up about what this experience of working with Wayne on his final film was like.

“I went to meet him with (director) Don Siegal. Somebody had given Wayne that week’s copy of TV Guide. My picture was on the cover. He looked at it, looked at me, and said, ‘Ah, here’s the big shot,'” Howard said to UPI.

“But it turned out my television background was something he really related to because those Westerns were sort of his version of being a television actor,” he added. “He felt like with that kind of background, a person would know how to get it done.”

From that day onward, Wayne and Howard bonded quickly.

“[H]e couldn’t have been nicer,” Howard said of Wayne. “He talked a lot about television, about how it’s such a good training ground sort of like the one- and two-reelers Wayne made when he was young.”

“I always admired him as a movie star, but I thought of him as a total naturalist,” Howard added to the Huffington Post. “Even those pauses were probably him forgetting his line and then remembering it again, because, man, he’s The Duke. But he’s working on this scene and he’s like, ‘Let me try this again.’ And he put the little hitch in and he’d find the Wayne rhythm, and you’d realize that it changed the performance each and every time.”

In an interview with the Men’s Journal, Howard talked more about the impression Wayne left on him.

“John Wayne used a phrase, which he later attributed to [film director] John Ford, for scenes that were going to be difficult: ‘This is a job of work,’ he’d say. If there was a common thread with these folks – Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Glenn Ford – it was the work ethic,” he said. “It was still driving them. To cheat the project was an insult. To cheat the audience was damnable.”