John C. Reilly wasn’t totally sure what to make of Joaquin Phoenix at first. The actor, who happily admits that he works better in pairs, had met his latest on-screen partner a few times before, through their mutual friend Paul Thomas Anderson. But he found himself at a bit of a loss when they first came together to start work on their off-kilter Western, The Sisters Brothers. “It was hard to even make eye contact,” he tells Mike Hogan on this week’s episode of the Little Gold Men podcast. “He’s such an intense personality, and I suppose in some way I am too.”

They cemented their relationship with a series of long walks during which they said virtually nothing to each other, and eventually moved on to sharing an apartment during the film’s production—cooking meals for each other and bonding in a way that’s evident on screen in The Sisters Brothers. The two play the titular siblings cutting a violent path through gold rush-era California, and testing their relationship in the process. “What I came away with is someone I’ll love for the rest of my life,” Reilly says of his experience on the film. “Sometimes you end up with someone that you really love, and I can definitely say that’s true of Joaquin.”

In the interview, Reilly talks about some of his other famous on-screen partners, including Will Ferrell (with whom he’ll reunite in December’s Holmes & Watson) and Steve Coogan, who stars with Reilly in a film about another famous duo, Laurel and Hardy. Also on this week’s podcast, Joanna Robinson brings a dispatch from Austin’s Fantastic Fest, a home for genre films that aren’t necessarily awards contenders . . . but since the success of Get Out, isn’t that an assumption we should be challenging? Richard Lawson previews the highlights of the upcoming New York Film Festival, and the wave of buzz that’s about to arrive for The Favourite. And the entire group discusses Free Solo and the state of the best-documentary-feature race, which is grappling with a rare thing for the documentary race: too many blockbusters.

Take a listen to this week’s episode of Little Gold Men above, and find the show on Apple Podcasts, where you can also leave a rating and a review.