Interview

Precious, which opens at the end of this week, redefines "crowd-pleaser." The only film ever to win audience awards at both Sundance and Toronto, it's about a Harlem teenager who's so deep in the gutter–poor, illiterate, obese, sexually abused, pregnant, and then some–that it's almost impossible to imagine her crawling out. "When she's in the red carpet fantasies, that's her," director Lee Daniels said of newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the film's title character, after a screening at last month's New York Film Festival. (PHOTO: MARIAH CAREY AND GABOUREY SIDIBE IN PRECIOUS)

Though he was skeptical at first, Daniels let casting director Billy Hopkins persuade him to reach out to some big names for the supporting roles: "He said, you're doing a movie about a 300-pound black girl! Anything's game," Daniels recalled. And since Daniels "didn't even bother to start going to studios" for funding, getting Carey, Kravitz, and (in an astoundingly thankless and demanding role) Mo'Nique involved undoubtedly made it easier for him to sell the film to Lionsgate.

Daniels' past credits include Monster's Ball, which he co-produced, and, less successfully, Shadowboxer, which he co-produced and directed. His latest is a fusion of arthouse texture and mainstream uplift. "I brought that world I knew into the world of urban," he said, adding,  "I'm proud that we were able to marry those worlds, and show black art in a new way."

In the process, Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher made a few highbrow tweaks to Push, the brutal, best-selling novel on which their film was based. One horrendous domestic scene evaporates into an imaginary feast inspired by Vittorio de Sica's classic Two Women, which Precious and her mother have been watching on TV. A fanciful connection, perhaps, but Daniels defends it. "If we staged it in the reality, as the book does, it would have been X-rated. And I found that when bad things happened to me [as a child] I would pretend to be somewhere else," he said. "The argument on set was, would these women be watching Two Women? Well, I am the women, so shut up."