'Precious' director strives for hope amid despair

Director Lee Daniels talks with Gabourey Sidibe, center, and Xosha Roquemore during filming of the movie “Precious.”

Director Lee Daniels talks with Gabourey Sidibe, center, and Xosha Roquemore during filming of the movie “Precious.”

NEW YORK — To begin to understand director Lee Daniels, you can start by looking closely at the living room of the broken-down Harlem apartment created for Claireece “Precious” Jones, the obese, illiterate, abused teenager at the center of his emotionally raw new drama, “Precious.” There you’ll see remnants of the apartment in the tough Philadelphia neighborhood where Daniels grew up. The fabric on the walls is the same, the worn couch a replica, a framed photo of his late father hangs on the wall; and the memories, the ones that refuse to leave him alone, linger in the stairways and color the scenes.

The place in “Precious,” where women and children are beaten down verbally and physically, where life is disposable, is one that Daniels knows well. Being dealt a bad hand and surviving it is a theme that the 49-year-old filmmaker has come at artistically more than any others.

It’s there in the films he’s produced including 2001’s “Monster’s Ball,” which won an Oscar for Halle Berry as a black woman involved with the white racist prison guard who presided over her husband’s execution, and in 2004’s “The Woodsman,” a pedophile’s life examined starring Kevin Bacon. It’s central to the first feature Daniels directed, 2005’s “Shadowboxer,” and now it’s at its most painful and empowering yet, in “Precious,” with Mo’Nique as Mary, a soul-destroying perversion of motherhood, and introducing Gabourey Sidibe as her teenage daughter, Precious.

“There’s something about women. ... I feel for the injustices,” he says.

Those feelings all begin with his mother, Clara, now 67.

“She had many, many things thrown at her in life, hard things,” he says, “and I watched it, watched her remain this stoic figure that carried on.”

There is also his father, William, who died when Daniels was “12 or 13, I can’t recall,” which he offers up casually, as if that loss weren’t infused with searing emotions.

The father represents a stolen childhood for Daniels, a violent act witnessed by Daniels at 5, one he is not ready to speak about publicly; the responsibility he felt years later to watch over the three sisters and a brother, born after him.

“When I reflect on it, on why I did this movie, it has a lot to do with my youth, what I witnessed, and that girl who came to my door at 3 o’clock on a summer afternoon when I was 11,” he says. “But it also has to do with the food I was eating, the pork, the chitlins, the cockroaches on the walls, the mice we’d throw bread at; it’s a combination of all that was.”

The girl was a 7-year-old neighbor named Angie, and the moment was a seminal one for the director. Daniels remembers opening the door of their West Philly apartment to find this morbidly overweight child, naked, crying, trying to cover herself with her hands, bloody welts raised on her back and arms by an electrical cord. The memory was profound, the words, “Mommy beat me,” haunted him, that and the fear he saw in his own mother’s eyes.

When, years later, he read “Push,” those images rose up.

“I could smell every scent, I could see the texture of the walls, I was shaking. Shaking,” he says. “It was like family — I knew it intimately — but I didn’t know whether I wanted the story told.”

Mo’Nique, whom Daniels had worked with in “Shadowboxer,” was his only choice to play Precious’ mother. He trusted that she would trust him enough when he asked her to disappear inside this monstrous life.

And Mo’Nique’s immersion into the role of mother as abuser and betrayer, riding a river of rage, won her the dramatic acting award at Sundance and has her name surfacing in awards talk now.

The scenes between Mary and Precious were among the most wrenching, and Daniels resorted to breaks where he would hold them and the three would cry, before he would say, “OK dolls, we gotta do it again,” as well as using a lot of very morbid humor.

“I looked for humor everywhere I could,” Daniels says. “We lived through laughter on this set; it was the only way to survive some of it.”

“This film is about feeling blessed with what you have, and it’s about healing,” Daniels says, “my healing, yes, but for all the others who have witnessed or experienced.

“And for Angie, I hope somewhere she’s safe and sound and well.”

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