Spike Lee’s grandmother made a great sacrifice.

Lee is an Academy Award-winning director and screenwriter revered by many. His mother and grandmother played a role in shaping his creativity and artistic sense during childhood.

“My mother was a cinephile and wanted her children to be well-rounded. She took us to Broadway plays as well as museums and libraries. And we went, kicking and screaming. That was the basis for our understanding of art and creativity,” Lee told Sleek Magazine.

As Lee grew older, he acknowledged that film “discovered” him during his junior year of college, according to an interview with Hamilton College. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports Lee started at Morehouse College in 1975. His father, Bill, graduated from Morehouse in 1951, and his grandfather, Richard Shelton, graduated in 1926.

Lee had been a C and D student and had not initially declared a major, per The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. During the first semester of his sophomore year at the HBCU, his mother, Jacqueline, died of liver cancer.

“It was rough, and I didn’t really have confidence in myself, so I was just wandering,” Lee expressed to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Lee’s formative year was the Summer of 1977. He was in New York at the time and, in an interview with Vulture, Lee said he was broke and had no summer jobs. While visiting the home of his friend Vietta Johnson he noticed a box. After inquiring about it, she told him a Super 8 camera was inside and that he was free to use it.

“Now I had something to do. I spent the whole summer documenting that infamous summer. When the blackout happened, I was filming all my fellow sisters and brothers, and the looting was crazy. I later told a teacher at Clark Atlanta University, across from Morehouse, Dr. Herb Eichelberger, about the stuff I had shot,” Lee told the outlet.

“He says, ‘You’re making a documentary.’ He took an interest in me. On days when he wasn’t even teaching, he would come to school and open up the lab so I could work on this short called ‘Last Hustle in Brooklyn,'” Spike Lee continued.

Throughout his time at Morehouse, he received financial backing from his grandmother, Zimmie Retha Shelton, who had been an art teacher in Georgia for 50 years during Jim Crow, according to an interview with GQ.

“For 50 years, she saved the social security checks for her grandchildren’s education… She put me through Morehouse,” he said in the interview.

Lee’s grandmother passed in 2006 at 100 years old. Her sacrifices were not in vain.

Spike Lee’s portfolio includes “Do the Right Thing,” “Inside Man,” and “Malcolm X,” per IMDb. He made his directorial debut in 1986, and nearly 40 years later, he remains invested in his craft.

His latest project, “Highest 2 Lowest,” is a crime thriller starring A$AP Rocky and Denzel Washington.  It marks Lee’s fifth project with Washington, according to NPR.