On the night Boyz n the Hood opened in theaters in July 1991, the film’s 23-year-old writer-director John Singleton rented a limousine and rode around his native Los Angeles. Along with a few USC friends and some cast members, Singleton stopped at local theaters to gauge the audience’s reaction to the movie. At one point in the evening, he arrived at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, the theater he frequented as a kid.

Wearing a hat that read “South Central LA,” Singleton thanked the audience for their support. The mood was festive and triumphant. A woman and her boyfriend then approached the filmmaker. “He was an OG, a gangster dude,” Singleton told me during a 2006 interview I did for a Boyz n the Hood oral history originally published in King magazine. “You could tell he did time.” The man, whose eyes were red and watery, did not open his mouth. He just stared upward in silence. His girlfriend did all the talking. She went on to say how much she loved the film, and that her boyfriend did as well. “He really liked it,” she told Singleton. “During the movie, he kept saying, ‘That’s my story. That’s my story.’”

Singleton, who died on Monday at 51, said that was the best compliment he ever received for Boyz n the Hood, a film that earned $57.5 million at the domestic box office and received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director; Singleton was the first African American and the youngest person to ever be nominated in the latter category.

At a time when Hollywood—and white America as a whole—didn’t concern itself with the young Black men growing up in inner cities, John Singleton brought their stories—his stories—to the big screen. And how he did it was a story in itself.

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Boyz, of course, was his story. Like Tre Styles, the film’s protagonist, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in his first major role, Singleton was around 11 years old when his mother sent him to live with his father. He already knew, at that point, what he wanted to do with his life. As with most kids growing up in L.A. at the time, Singleton looked up to Marcus Allen, Magic, and Kareem. But he also admired Spielberg and Lucas, and later on Truffaut.

He first shared the plot for Boyz n the Hood on his application to USC’s film-writing program. In its earliest inception, the movie was called Summer of ’84, but Singleton tabled the idea at school, where he twice won USC’s Jack Nicholson writing award for best feature-length screenplay.

Malcolm Norrington, a fellow Trojan, recalled movie nights in Singleton’s dorm. “John would have these projects for film school, where he would have to shoot a short film,” he said in 2006. “We would then come over, some girls, and we’d watch the films he shot. His room was filled with film reels, books about film, movies, comic books, and clothes scattered about.”

When asked about Singleton’s demeanor in college, Norrington described a man driven, almost, by destiny. “He knew what he wanted to do. There was no doubt in his mind or our mind that he would be successful because he wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

Then, in the summer of 1989, Singleton saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing at a preview screening in Hollywood. Afterward, he walked down the street with the girl he was dating, talking to himself, muttering “I got to do my shit. I’m making my movie.” He soon started writing, often with N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It as his soundtrack. “[Dr.] Dre used to do these cool scenes within the flow of the song. He would put special effects within the beats, so you could visualize what was happening,” Singleton said. “If you didn’t grow up in Los Angeles, it looked like cowboys and Indians, but for me, this is the shit I knew. These guys were talking about shit that I seen.”

Singleton wrote what he knew, as the phrase goes, and finished the script within three weeks.

It all happened so fast from there.

Ever the comic book nerd, Singleton had an origin story to rival that of any superhero. Filled with moxie, he arrived for a job interview with Stephanie Allain, a script reader for Amy Pascal and Dawn Steel, two of Columbia Pictures’ top executives; Allain had been promoted out of the story department and wanted to replace herself with another person of color. Singleton already had an agent, and not one from any piddling agency, but CAA, the house that Mike Ovitz built.

In Allain’s office, Singleton spent the meeting discussing Boyz n the Hood, the movie he had written and was planning to direct. Allain already believed in Singleton’s talent. She had read one of his award-winning screenplays, Twilight Time, a story about four sisters coming together at their mother’s funeral. The conversation quickly went from the open reader position to Singleton pitching a movie. “He was scarily, crazily, absolutely, and completely confident,” she remembered. It then became her mission to read Boyz n the Hood.

After two weeks of phone calls, Allain got her hands on the screenplay, and it did not disappoint. A coming-of-age tale set in gang-ridden South Central L.A., Boyz n the Hood marked the work of an expert storyteller with a gift for building tension and creating real characters. By the end of the script, Allain was in tears. She was going to make this movie. A meeting was then scheduled between Singleton and Columbia executives, including chairman Frank Price, one of the few studio heads to come from a writing background. Singleton, once again, stated that he would direct the film. He even declined a six-figure offer for the screenplay at one point during the negotiations to prove his resolve. By the end of the meeting, Singleton had won over the room and gotten the directing job.

“John sat at the head of the table and told us how he was going to do it and that it was going to be great,” Allain said. “We believed him.”

The suits were nervous about handing a major motion picture over to a 22-year-old kid, but this was a $6.5 million production during the decadent Jon Peters–and–Peter Guber era at Sony. Once Price green-lit the movie, he didn’t interfere.

The veteran on set was Rob Reiner collaborator Steve Nicolaides, who came aboard as producer after Allain passed the script along to him in August 1990. “You know how there are times in your life when a new taste or a new girlfriend or some literature changes your life? That’s what happened to me with Boyz n the Hood,” he said. “I was really political and worked in campaigns in college and had the desire to work on things that are important and could help people’s lives. I thought Boyz n the Hood was a very powerful story.”

Nicolaides met Singleton for the first time at Singleton’s mother’s house, where they shared homemade lemonade and bonded over their love of Reiner’s Stand by Me, which Nicolaides had worked on as production manager. He had suggestions for the film: Do not hire a production designer when an art director can do, and, aside from Laurence Fishburne, who would play Tre’s father, Furious Styles, do not cast known actors. Singleton agreed.

Casting was on his mind as he wrote the film. Initially he envisioned the members of N.W.A starring in Boyz n the Hood with Dr. Dre as Monster, Eazy-E as the wheelchair-using Chris, MC Ren as Dooky, and Ice Cube as Doughboy. But Cube, the one member of N.W.A who Singleton had a relationship with, left the group toward the end of 1989.

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Singleton and Cube had developed a friendship of sorts after meeting backstage at The Arsenio Hall Show in 1989 and again later that year at a Louis Farrakhan rally. Both times, Singleton told Cube that he would one day put him in a movie. Both times, Cube politely brushed him off. Then, in early 1990, the USC film student ran into the ex-N.W.A frontman at a Public Enemy concert at the Palace. By this point, Singleton had finished the screenplay for Boyz n the Hood. Cube and Singleton talked in the parking lot that night until it emptied. A few months later, the script landed with Cube’s manager.

Call time on October 1, 1990, the first day of filming, was at 7 a.m., but Singleton arrived on set at 5:30 to watch the trucks load in the equipment. It was a foggy morning, and the unit photographer shadowed Singleton as he paced the Inglewood streets he was raised on. There was a groove on the set that morning, but reality settled in at the end of the day when the team lost some footage following a dark room accident.

There were other stumbling blocks during the two-month shoot. The barbecue scene turned into a real party, pushing production a day and a half behind schedule. A more serious problem was the gangs. After a fight on set between members of Cube’s Lench Mob and a local kid, a Bloods leader named Bone demanded a meeting with Nicolaides at the Boulevard Café. “I know you are planning to shoot a scene where Ice Cube blows away three Bloods at a hamburger stand,” Bone told the producer. “That’s across the street from the Jungle. … Some 14-year old kid wanting to earn stripes is going to bust a cap in Ice Cube.”

The next morning Nicolaides told Singleton that they were not shooting at that burger stand.

Still, Singleton grew in confidence with each day, benefiting from Nicolaides’s decision to shoot the film in continuity. Unlike most first-time directors, who are more comfortable with the technical aspects of filmmaking, Singleton communicated with his actors with confidence. He didn’t talk much, and his suggestions were simple and direct—“Don’t smile,” he kept reminding Cuba Gooding Jr.—but he was open to collaboration. “He was an actor’s director,” Tyra Ferrell said.

Boyz n the Hood was an immediate sensation after its premiere at Cannes in May 1991, with Roger Ebert emerging as the film’s biggest booster. “By the end of Boyz n the Hood, I realized I had seen not simply a brilliant directorial debut, but an American film of enormous importance,” is how the critic ended his four-star review. The film caught on with audiences as well, earning $10 million on opening weekend with a higher per-screen average than Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Boyz is a shockingly mature statement from a 22-year-old; Furious Styles’s speech about gentrification is one of those moments that younger viewers in 1991 might have overlooked, but was prescient. Then there is Singleton’s depiction of the Bloods and the Crips—gang names that are never uttered in the film. When I first interviewed Singleton in 2006, I made the mistake of asking how he decided to depict the Bloods as the film’s antagonists. After all, he grew up with friends on both sides.

“How are the Bloods the bad guys in the movie?” he responded. “I set out to make it like the guys were shadows of each other. Doughboy is just like the guy in the movie he ends up killing. There are three guys that they are chasing and there are three guys in the car after them. There was a mixed reaction in the theater when [Doughboy] shoots them. There were people cheering and there were people who got the whole implication, which was ‘Hey, these people are the same and they are killing each other.’”

There was a point in his career when Singleton wanted to move past the acclaim of his debut. “After the success of Boyz n the Hood, I was sick of talking about Boyz n the Hood,” he once told me. “I’m still kind of sick of talking about it, but I’m really proud of the movie. I just don’t want to be remembered for making one movie. I’ve damn sure proved that I’m not a one-hit wonder.”

Remove Boyz from his filmography, and Singleton still has a Hall of Fame résumé. He cast 2Pac as Janet’s love interest in a movie featuring a Maya Angelou cameo; turned Brian O’Conner into a badass while also diversifying The Fast and the Furious franchise; and reminded us in Higher Learning that, now, as ever, Nazis are bad. He also directed the devastating historical drama Rosewood and Baby Boy, the Casino to Boyz’s Goodfellas.

Singleton’s films, particularly his work in the 1990s, were set in a world where death was right around the corner and could take any form: a Blood in a red Hyundai; an altercation at a drive-in movie theater; a Nazi on a college campus; a racist mob in the South. It was the world he knew.

“There are young Black men from Boyz n the Hood that aren’t with us anymore,” he has said. Dedrick Gobert, Dooky from the film, was murdered following a street car race in 1994. And Singleton’s childhood friend Lloyd Avery II, the Blood who killed Ricky, was murdered in Pelican Bay in 2005.

Singleton’s death on Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he was hospitalized reportedly after a stroke, was just as shocking. At 51 years old, he was still building a legacy. He still had more stories to tell.

Thomas Golianopoulos is a writer living in New York City. He has contributed to The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Grantland, and Complex.