Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese have worked together several times over the years, making some of the greatest movies in recent memory along the way. Famously, DiCaprio has offered his talents to Scorsese for the likes of Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street.

There’s a real trust in Scorsese when it comes to DiCaprio, and he’s now as closely associated with the actor as he is with Robert De Niro, with whom the director has also made many masterpiece films. In fact, Scorsese went as far as to call DiCaprio “a natural film actor” during an interview with Deadline.

“What’s great about Leo, and it’s why we work together so often, is he goes there,” Scorsese said. “He goes to these weird places that are so difficult and convoluted, and through the convolution, somehow, there’s a clarity that we reach. There’s something in his face that the camera locks into, in his eyes. The slightest movement, we know it.”

DiCaprio himself is, of course, in great admiration of Scorsese, widely considered one of the greatest actors of all time. But when it comes to picking his favourite from Scorsese’s impressive filmography, there can only be one winner. The actor chose Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro, in conversation with Scorsese and Charlie Rose.

“The one that really moved me the most was Taxi Driver, I think,” the actor said. “I remember watching it at 15 years old and being transfixed with Travis Bickle because I was locked into this character, and I felt such incredible empathy towards him. I understood him.”

He continued: “I understood his loneliness, and then he deceived me. You know. At the point he deceived me, I said, ‘What? Who is this guy that I’m watching? Who is this person?’ I was identifying with him, I was with him on this whole journey, and all of a sudden, ‘This is not the person that I thought he was’.”

DiCaprio then couldn’t help himself from saying, “To me, it’s just the greatest independent film ever made”. It was at that point that Scorsese might have felt a little embarrassed by DiCaprio’s comments because he quickly deflected the attention onto writer Paul Schrader. “Schrader’s extraordinary, his script. Paul went through a lot on that one.”

“He delivered this amazing [script],” Scorsese added. He went on to explain that Brian De Palma had actually given him the script, saying, “You gotta read this thing”.

Thankfully, Scorsese did, and he went on to make one of his greatest movies, which would eventually become a deep favourite of Leonardo DiCaprio.