E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is one of the most successful and beloved films of all time, telling the story of a lonely boy and his bond with a lost alien. But behind-the-scenes, there was an equally heartwarming bond forming between director Steven Spielberg and child actress Drew Barrymore.

Barrymore, who was just 7 while filming the 1982 classic, came from a difficult home life. As a descendent of the well-regarded Barrymore acting family, she was Hollywood royalty, but her own father John Drew Barrymore was an abusive alcoholic.

“My mom chose a wild card for my dad. He was a mad poet hedonist man child! But I understood that as a kid,” Barrymore would later write.

Barrymore never had a real relationship with her dad, who abandoned her mother Ildiko Jaid Barrymore when she was a child, but she does have memories of his erratic behavior, coming home whenever he needed money.

“Talk about someone who was not a careerist,” Barrymore told Vulture recently. “He was like, ‘I will burn this f***ing dynasty to the ground,’” she said of her father who was the son of acclaimed stage and film actor John Barrymore.

Barrymore herself later struggled with her own problems with drug and alcohol abuse as she grew up in the Hollywood spotlight. But during her time making E.T., she found a father figure in Steven Spielberg.

Speaking to Vulture, Barrymore had high praise for the acclaimed director, calling Spielberg “the only person in my life to this day that ever was a parental figure.”

Spielberg recalled keeping the iconic film’s set kid-friendly, trying to keep the magic alive by telling Barrymore that E.T.’s puppeteers were the alien’s “assistants.” He also shot the film in continuity order to make things easier for the kids.

Barrymore and Spielberg formed a bond: according to Vulture, she stayed with Spielberg during the weekends, he gifted her a pet cat and took her to trips to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. When she showed up to set wearing red lipstick, he told her to wipe it off.

Spielberg recalled that Barrymore asked him to be her “dad,” and the director had to say no, though he agreed to be her godfather. The director recalls feeling “helpless” that he could only do so much to help her during this difficult time.

“She was staying up way past her bedtime, going to places she should have only been hearing about, and living a life at a very tender age that I think robbed her of her childhood,” Spielberg said. “Yet I felt very helpless because I wasn’t her dad. I could only kind of be a consigliere to her.”

Perhaps he related to the young actress. Like Barrymore, Spielberg also came from a broken home: his parents’ divorce had a huge impact on his life, providing a major theme of his films from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The Fabelmans.