‘Didn’t you read my script?” John Singleton asked rapper Ice Cube in 1990. Singleton, then a 22-year-old fresh out of the U.S.C. film program, had set his heart on Cube to play Doughboy, a character based on one of Singleton’s boyhood friends—but Cube was blowing the audition.

Over a late breakfast at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, John Singleton and Ice Cube began to tell how Boyz N the Hood—the groundbreaking movie that put a human face on the gangsta-style killings that were then infesting South-Central Los Angeles—came to be made.

Singleton ordered a full meal (salmon, lamb sausage, tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, orange juice) while Cube stuck to a couple of apple martinis. “He’s more a man of refined tastes than a former gangsta rapper,” Singleton said about his friend. Cube wore a Detroit Tigers cap and sunglasses; Singleton looked like he had dressed for the golf course.

Cube, one of the founding fathers of gangsta rap, described how he had shown up at an office in South-Central Los Angeles to audition, but he just wasn’t taking it very seriously. “I’m trying to be the best rapper in the world. I’m not thinking about acting. And my manager was like, ‘Yo—somebody wants to put you in a movie! Here’s the script.’ ” Cube threw the script into the backseat of his car. When he got to the audition, he realized, “Oh, shit. He was for real. He wasn’t lying. He’s going to do a movie. This kid is no bullshit.” But, he admitted, “I was terrible.”

“Go home and read my script,” Singleton told Cube. “I’m going to give you one more shot, because they don’t want to hire you, and I’m dying inside. I know you’re good. I know you can do it.” Cube went home and read the script, and he had an epiphany: “Damn, they’re actually going to make a movie about how we grew up. I didn’t know how we grew up was even interesting enough to be a movie. But the way John captured it, it was like cinematic beauty.”

Singleton, Ice Cube, and Gooding, 1990. By D Stevens.

So when Cube went back to audition again, he felt he had everything he needed. “I know these characters back and forth. I can play any of these guys. I could have played the Cuba part [good guy Tre Styles, played by Cuba Gooding Jr.]. I could have played Ricky [Doughboy’s half-brother, on the cusp of a football career]. I could have played any of them, you know what I mean? Because they were all people I grew up with and knew.”

Singleton and Cube had first met in 1989, when Singleton was a directing intern on The Arsenio Hall Show. Cube had come to the show to hang out, but Security was giving him a hard time. Singleton jumped in and said, “Man, don’t you know who this is? This is Ice Cube! He’s with [the rap group] N.W.A [Niggaz with Attitude]!” Singleton was thrilled to meet one of his heroes, “because what they were doing in music was giving voice to everything I had seen growing up.” He had even taken his script’s title from a song by Cube that had been recorded by Eazy-E—but only after paying Eazy $50,000 for the rights.

“You know, I just felt this dude was a little delusional,” Cube recalled thinking when Singleton first approached him to be in his movie. “It’s just a pipe dream—that’s what I was thinking.” By January of 1990, Cube had left N.W.A to work with Public Enemy and was giving a concert at the Palace in Hollywood. After the concert Singleton again approached him. The two men stood talking in the empty parking lot. “I’m a director now,” Singleton said, “and I’m going to get this movie done, and you’re perfect for it.” But in the next breath, he ended up having to ask Cube for a ride back to his U.S.C. dorm.