Macaulay Culkin is opening up about the late comedy legend John Candy in John Candy: I Like Me, the new documentary that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Home Alone star, who first worked with Candy in John Hughes’ 1989 comedy Uncle Buck, remembered how the actor kept an eye on him when others looked the other way.

“I think he always had that really great instinct. I think he saw,” Culkin said in the doc, per Entertainment Weekly. “Listen, even before the wave crested and the Home Alone stuff was happening, it was not hard to see how difficult my father was. It was no secret. He was already a monster. All of a sudden, the fame and the money came, and he became an infamous monster. He was already not a good guy. I think John was looking a little side-eyed, like, ‘Is everything all right over there? You doing good? Good day? Everything’s all right? Everything good at home? All right.’”

Culkin added that he felt a “paternal” energy from Candy, describing him as someone who genuinely looked out for him. “It doesn’t happen that often,” he explained. “It actually happened less as time went on. I wish I got more of that in my life. It’s important that I remember that. I remember John caring when not a lot of people did.”

The documentary, directed by Colin Hanks and executive produced by Hanks and Ryan Reynolds, also features interviews with Steve Martin and Candy’s daughter Jennifer Candy-Sullivan. She said her father’s kindness toward Culkin rang true: “When we hear about Macaulay Culkin, that doesn’t surprise me because that’s who our dad was. He wasn’t going to just kind of ignore a kid because he was a kid actor and he was moving on to something else. It’s like he genuinely wanted to know.”

Hanks himself added, “The fact that John took that time to check in with Mac and make sure that he was doing OK, I related to that, having experienced it myself. John was like that with everybody. He was like that with the people that he worked with. He was like that with the people that he met on the street. John made you feel important. He made you feel heard, and that was really a unique quality.”

John Candy: I Like Me launches worldwide on Prime Video on October 10.