No one expected the director of The Notebook to follow one of the most romantic movies of all-time with a gritty true crime drama.

But that's exactly what Nick Cassavetes did in 2007 with Alpha Dog, a film inspired by the events leading up to the 2000 murder of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz over a dispute between his half-brother and drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood, who's serving a life sentence for the crime. For the movie, Cassavetes assembled a cast of up-and-coming actors, including Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, Olivia Wilde and Amanda Seyfried, as well as pop star Justin Timberlake. (Sadly, Anton Yelchin, who played Zack Mazursky, the character inspired by Markowitz, died in a freak accident at the age of 27 in 2016.)