Robert Maxwell for The New York Times

Published: October 21, 2009

I.

At the Cannes International Film Festival in May, in the loud, chaotic bar at the Martinez Hotel, Lee Daniels seemed, as he often does, both ecstatic and nervous. He jumped, he slumped, his mood changing from giddy to anxious. He was the only black man in the crowded bar, a fact that he mentioned and then brushed away. He was dressed unremarkably in a loose, untucked shirt and slouchy khaki pants, but his hair, an electric corona of six-inch fusilli-like spirals, demanded notice. Although Daniels will be 50 this year, he has the bouncy, mercurial energy of a child. The previous night, at the gala screening of his movie “Precious,” which he directed and helped produce, he greeted the audience by saying, “I’m a little homo, I’m a little Euro and I’m a little ghetto.” The crowd cheered.

Daniels knows what he’s selling: his films combine street-smart bravado with an art-house sensibility. “Precious,” the harrowing story of a 350-pound illiterate teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time by her father and horribly abused by her mother, is shot in an almost-documentary style interspersed with fantasy sequences. (It opens Nov. 6.) Like most independent films, it is character-driven, and at its heart is a spirit of understanding. When Precious’s plight lands her in a special school, she blossoms: the audience’s initial rejection of Precious, even repulsion at the sight of her, slowly gives way to a kind of identification.

At Cannes, the film received a 15-minute standing ovation. “They wouldn’t stop clapping,” Daniels told me as he gulped a vodka. “I’m a director — after six minutes, I’m saying, please sit down. But I’m also a producer, so I’m thinking, what’s the record? Can we break the record for the longest standing ovation at the festival?”

Just a few months before its premiere at Cannes, “Precious” won three awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including a special jury prize for Mo’Nique, who plays Precious’s monstrous mother. Graphic as the film is, it is less so than “Push,” the 1996 novel on which it is based. Written by an African-American poet and writer known as Sapphire, “Push” relied on intentionally misspelled, broken and slangy English to convey Precious’s sense of despair and rage. The novel mixes poems by Precious with sexually extreme scenes, like those in which she is forced to perform oral sex on her mother. It is almost relentlessly bleak: when Precious discovers she is H.I.V.-positive, she is certain of her imminent death. Daniels’s movie, by contrast, offers a greater sense of possibility. He doesn’t ignore her disease, hardships or struggles, but he also liberates her from them. Precious is a stand-in for anyone — black, white, male, female — who has ever been devalued or underestimated.

Yet the movie is not neutral on the subject of race and the prejudices that swirl around it, even in the supposedly postracial age of Obama. “ ‘Precious’ is so not Obama,” Daniels said. “ ‘Precious’ is so not P.C. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I’m prejudiced. I’m prejudiced against people who are darker than me. When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar. Anybody that’s heavy like Precious — I thought they were dirty and not very smart. Making this movie changed my heart. I’ll never look at a fat girl walking down the street the same way again.”

For some audiences, that may not be reason enough to make a movie that risks reinforcing old stereotypes. It’s a criticism Daniels has heard before. “As African-Americans, we are in an interesting place,” Daniels said. “Obama’s the president, and we want to aspire to that. But part of aspiring is disassociating from the face of Precious. To be honest, I was embarrassed to show this movie at Cannes. I didn’t want to exploit black people. And I wasn’t sure I wanted white French people to see our world.” He paused. “But because of Obama, it’s now O.K. to be black. I can share that voice. I don’t have to lie. I’m proud of where I come from. And I wear it like a shield. ‘Precious’ is part of that.”

Before he could untangle this thought, Daniels was interrupted by Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, who had been sitting in a corner booth. “I love your movie,” he said. “It’s a beautiful movie.” Frémaux put out his hand to shake. “C’est incroyable!”

As Frémaux darted away, Daniels looked stunned, then gleeful, then serious. “I am so used to having two faces,” he said, as if to explain his theatrical shifts in mood. “A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face. But old habits die hard, and sometimes I can’t remember who I’m supposed to be.”

II.

AS A PRODUCER, Daniels had been to Cannes before. In 2004, he took “The Woodsman,” starring Kevin Bacon as a convicted sex offender, to the festival and received a respectful if guarded reception. He came to Cannes with a track record for controversial material: in 2001, he produced “Monster’s Ball,” a melodrama about bigotry and interracial love in the South. Halle Berry won an Oscar for her portrayal of a waitress who falls for a white prison guard, not knowing he helped execute her husband. Initially, Berry was considered too glamorous for the role, but Daniels fought for her. He’s known for his inventive casting: in “Monster’s Ball,” Sean Combs plays a murderer on death row; in “The Woodsman,” the hip-hop artist Mos Def is a parole officer; and in “Precious,” Mariah Carey is unrecognizable as a welfare caseworker, while Lenny Kravitz convincingly portrays a nurse. Perhaps his most inspired idea was casting Mo’Nique, known for her bawdy stand-up comedy, as Precious’s mother.

Daniels not only dreamed up casting, developed scripts and attached directors for the films he produced but, lacking backing from a major studio, also had to find financing. Because of the kind of subject matter he’s attracted to, that wasn’t easy. “In my early days, I loved the challenge,” he said as we sat in the Martinez bar in Cannes. “Even now, I don’t think twice about raising money. It’s no different than a drug deal. People have trouble getting movies made, but how many people could go out and steal for their families? You go in, you go gangster, you get what you’ve got to get and go on to the next. It’s just another hustle.”

Like the Jewish immigrants who created the movie business in Hollywood, Daniels has the will and the perspective of an outsider. “All the barriers were in Lee’s way,” explains Bob Berney, now the C.E.O. of Apparition, who bought and distributed “The Woodsman” for Newmarket. “No one was helping him. And whatever he’s seen or has happened to him in his life, it has motivated him. He’s not afraid to say, You’re not listening to me because of what I look like and who I am and you’re wrong.”

After producing two films, Daniels quickly became frustrated with not having complete control of his movies. “I kind of co-directed ‘Monster’s Ball,’ ” Daniels told me as he ordered another drink (the actual director was Marc Forster). “I gave Halle her line readings. I knew how to do that: you tap into people’s souls.” Daniels leaned forward. “I was tired of producing because, at the end of the day, I was tired of creating monster movie-star directors. I was stuck with, How am I going to find my next $2 million to make my next movie and they’re walking away to jobs that pay them $2 million. I thought, How do I get my voice across? I wanted to direct.”

Daniels, who grew up in a rough southwest Philadelphia neighborhood, wanted to make a movie that melded his history with the lush, operatic intensity of Pedro Almodóvar or Wong Kar-wai. The first film he directed, “Shadowboxer,” which he also produced, has a loony premise: a hit man (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.) is having an affair with his dying stepmother (Helen Mirren, pre-“The Queen” ), and together they are raising a child. It’s violent, sexually explicit and very strange. “ ‘Shadowboxer’ is purple, and I love purple,” Mirren told me when I called her in Los Angeles to speak about Daniels. “But that’s Lee. We met in the most unusual way. One day, I was walking on Houston Street in Manhattan and because there were a lot of holes in the road, I was looking down at my feet. I got a tap on the shoulder, and I jumped. This mad-looking man with wild dreadlocks says, ‘I love you and I have a movie I want you to do.’ I thought, this is a complete madman, I’ll never hear from this person again. Ninety-nine percent of the people who approach you this way are living in a fantasy world. But Lee, due to his charm and belief, makes his fantasies real. He doesn’t hear ‘no.’ ”

“ ‘Shadowboxer’ was based on my life,” Daniels told me, as a man began playing show tunes on the piano. “I knew killers. My uncle, who took care of me, murdered people, and yet he took care of me too. People who have gone to jail for murder are also human. Black people are not all saints.”

III.

A MONTH AFTER Cannes, Daniels was back in Manhattan in his 11th-floor loftlike apartment near Madison Square Garden. “This is where I raised money for ‘Precious,’ ” he said. Daniels, dressed in black, lay sprawled on a plum-colored sectional sofa; on a low, white table in front of him were piles of scripts and stacks of photographs from “Precious.” A Roller Disco pinball machine stood next to a baby grand piano, and a large TV screen dominated one side of the room. Although he had a separate office in the same building, Daniels’s apartment seemed more like a lavish hotel suite than a home.

“These are my girls!” he said, picking up a photo showing Gabourey Sidibe, who plays Precious, with Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, who plays the teacher who changes Precious’s life, and Mariah Carey. “Mariah is everything we’re not supposed to love and yet, we absolutely love her,” Daniels said, staring at the photo. “She’s crazy — look at her! She would throw herself under the train for you, as long as her hair was perfect.” Daniels laughed. “I made this movie for my girls. People read so much into ‘Precious.’ But at the end, it’s just this girl, and she’s trying to live. I know this chick. You know her. But we just choose not to know her.”

Daniels read “Push” when it was first published. “I slept with the book under my pillow for three months,” he said now. “At first, Sapphire wouldn’t sell me the rights. She said she had many suitors after her for the material. Then, she saw ‘Shadowboxer,’ and she cried in my arms. Critics didn’t like ‘Shadowboxer,’ but a lot of African-Americans understood it. And Sapphire saw it and trusted me with her baby.”

As the script was being written, Daniels began to figure out the financing of the movie. “Getting Sapphire’s permission was only half the challenge,” Daniels explained. “ ‘Shadowboxer’ hadn’t done so well, so I found myself back at Square 1. It was very, very hard to get financing for ‘Precious.’ All the studios said no. They didn’t want to make a film about a 350-pound black girl who is abused. Everybody kept saying no. My whole life was no. It was just a bunch of nos.”

Eventually, Daniels found independent financing. “Lee is brilliant at finding investors,” Mirren said. “On ‘Shadowboxer,’ he found this rich man in Philadelphia who paid for the movie, God bless him.” For “Precious,” Daniels raised the initial $8 million (the budget eventually grew to about $10 million) from Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness, who live in Denver. Both are successful entrepreneurs and have family money — her parents founded Celestial Seasonings, and his father started the cable giant TCI — and had worked with Daniels before. They agreed that “Precious” was worth the risk. “At the end of the day, I’m a promoter,” Daniels said now. “But I also let the work speak for itself.”

Once he had the money, he needed the girl. “I couldn’t call Hollywood and say, ‘Send over all your 300-pound black girls,’ ” Daniels explained. “They’d laugh.” To find Precious, Daniels and Billy Hopkins, a casting director (and Daniels’s ex-boyfriend and the co-parent of their 13-year-old twins, Clara and Liam), held open casting calls. They went to McDonald’s and Macy’s; they visited cities like Detroit and Chicago; and they advertised in college and high-school newspapers. Daniels saw 500 girls, including one of his nieces. Ten finalists, none of whom had ever acted before, were put through an aspiring-thespian “boot camp.” “It was kind of like ‘American Idol,’ ” Daniels said. “But I still wasn’t happy. We were weeks away from filming, and I still hadn’t found Precious.”

Gabourey Sidibe (pronounced SIH-deh-bay), who is 26, knew about the movie from her mother, Alice Tan Ridley, an R&B singer who often performs in the Times Square subway station (near the entrance to the R train). Ridley had been approached about auditioning for the role of Mary, Precious’s monster of a mother. “She didn’t think she could play Mary,” Sidibe told me. “But she thought I should audition. She always thinks I can do anything. I did fit the physical requirements, and I finally decided to go read for Billy Hopkins. Afterward, he didn’t speak for 30 seconds. Later, I met with Lee, and he said, ‘I want you to be in my movie.’ The first audition was Monday, and on Wednesday, my life changed.”

Unlike Precious, Sidibe is well spoken and cheerful. “I’m not her,” Sidibe said emphatically. “But, when I was 14 or 15, I saw myself in a different way. Back then, I envied a life that I’d made up in my mind. I broke free of that unhappiness and I decided to change — I was going to be happy with myself. No matter what I look like, no matter what people think.” Daniels realized that Sidibe’s attitude was crucial to playing Precious. “My sister was an obese crack addict,” Daniels said. “She had a chicken wing in one hand and a crack pipe in the other, and yet she had a line of white men waiting for her. People make assumptions about fat people that are wrong, and like my sister, Gabby is comfortable in her body. She may be in a state of denial or on a higher plane than the rest of us, but either way, she breaks your heart in the movie.”

Daniels has said all this before — to journalists, to investors, to anyone he thinks needs convincing of Precious’s appeal. Like much of Daniels’s patter, it sounds both rehearsed and contradictory. But it’s also colorful and strangely persuasive — as long as you don’t listen too closely. Daniels is always convincing someone of something, and like any good salesman, he knows that selling is not just about the truth. “He’s not dishonest,” Bob Berney told me. “But Lee does what he thinks he has to do.”

Before Sidibe was cast, Daniels phoned Mo’Nique and told her he had a part for her that was “going to mess up your career. You are going to lose your world, your audience, your standing in the BET community.” Mo'nique was not fazed. “I did not hesitate!” she exclaimed on a warm day in September in New York City. “I said to Lee, if you want me to play this demon, I am there.” I met Mo’Nique and her ever-present entourage — bodyguard, assistant, full-time videographer who records her every move from the moment she leaves her house in Atlanta to when she returns at night — at the City Crab & Seafood Company on Park Avenue South. It was her choice. Mo’Nique, who was dressed in a tight black cocktail dress and high heels, entered the restaurant as if it were a premiere. Although she is deliberately elusive — since Sundance Mo’Nique has not attended a single festival showing of “Precious,” including Cannes, Toronto and the New York Film Festival — when she shows up (in this case, nearly an hour late) she has the radiance of the sun. “She’s got magic,” Helen Mirren told me. “During ‘Shadowboxer,’ Mo’Nique was a great inspiration to me. Casting her is classic Lee — he loves the true outsider. Not the fake Hollywood outsider, like Brad Pitt or someone. Mo’Nique is part of the world he came from, and in his movies, he manages to make that outsider world universal.”

Although Mo’Nique’s performance as Precious’s mother has generated talk of an Oscar, Daniels has heard complaints from the black community about the image her character pro­jects. “They see the film as negative to black women,” Daniels said. “Black women are the pillar of the family. Black men have left, and how dare I stab at the one thing that’s helped. So I told Mo’Nique, ‘They’re going to hate you for this movie.’ She said, ‘Let them hate me.’ ”

Mo’Nique wasn’t in town to talk about “Precious.” She recently signed a multimillion-dollar deal with BET (Black Entertainment Television) to do a nightly 11 p.m. talk show, and she had back-to-back interviews for five days to promote it. Although there have been published reports that she will not support “Precious” by going to film festivals unless she’s paid a steep fee, Mo’Nique seems unequivocally devoted to Daniels. They met at a Los Angeles party in 2002 after “Monster’s Ball,” and Daniels recalls hearing that Mo’Nique was among those who complained about the casting of Halle Berry, asking: “Why did you cast that skinny light-skinned girl in your movie?” (Mo’Nique denies having made that remark.) A year later, Daniels offered Mo’Nique a role in “Shadowboxer.” “My part was written as a size 0 white woman with big breasts,” Mo’Nique told me over lunch, after requesting three orders of jumbo buffalo shrimp to go. “And Lee gave that role to me, a 260-pound black woman with little breasts. What I dig about Lee Daniels is he’s fearless. He tells his truth. So when he called and asked me to play this demon, I said: ‘Sign me up, sugar. Sign me up.’ ”

In part, Mo’Nique was intrigued by the role of Mary Jones because, she says, she was abused by a brother when she was a young girl. The abuse supposedly began when Mo’Nique was 7 and continued for four years. “We wanted people to see the illness,” Mo’Nique explained. “Lee said, be a monster. And my brother was that monster to me. When Lee said, ‘Action,’ that’s who I became.”

Like Mo’Nique, Daniels, too, says that he was a victim of abuse, that he was beaten by his father, a policeman. “He wanted Lenny to be tough,” Daniels’s Aunt Dot, who is his father’s sister, told me. “Leonardo is Lee’s given name, and we all call him Lenny. I think Lenny was gay from the time he was a baby, and his father saw him walking and acting real feminine, and he wanted Lenny to be tough. He tried to get him into boxing. He was verbally cruel. He cracked the whip.”

According to Daniels, it didn’t stop there. “He regularly beat me,” Daniels said. “One time, I put on my mom’s red patent-leather high heels, and he beat me. I knew he loved me, but he thought I wouldn’t survive as a black gay guy.” When Daniels was 15, his father was shot and killed. “We were just starting to be friends,” Daniels said. “He died the way he lived — tragically.”

Daniels’s father was killed in 1975, when three armed men walked into a southwest Philadelphia bar where he had gone for a drink after work and started robbing the patrons. When they saw his father's badge, they shot him. “He was a hero in that moment,” Daniels told me. “But I knew a different man. It’s taken me a long time to forgive him. He wanted me to be a man who’s strong and could attack the world, so what does that say? That beating a kid is good? Being told you’re nothing makes you what you are? My father could have been sent to jail for what he did to me, but he also made me tough. I never give up. Never ever ever. I hope that doesn’t justify his behavior.”

IV.

BY THE TIME Daniels moved to Los Angeles in 1980, he had changed his name to Lee. “I should have been a casualty, honey,” he told me one afternoon this fall over rib-eye steak and lobster cocktail at his haunt, the Staghorn Steakhouse restaurant on the edge of the garment district, conveniently located on the ground floor of his apartment building. “How did I get out of where I was raised? When my father died, I started shoplifting and my brother became a drug dealer. The ghetto is a place of war. And where we have come with Obama being president is the complete opposite of where I’m from. One of my brothers — there are five of us, and I’m the oldest — has spent most of his adult life, off and on, in jail. And he now has a job. I had the gift for talk, but I could have been him. The story could have gone that way.” Daniels paused. “I came to L.A. with $7 to my name. I knew instinctively that the hustle was on.”

As always, Daniels is weaving a cinematic tale of his youth. According to Aunt Dot, he didn’t live in the ghetto, and his brother spent only about five years in jail. But things weren’t easy, and he definitely wanted out. After attending Lindenwood University in Missouri, Daniels dropped out before his junior year and moved West with the idea of becoming a screenwriter. To support himself, he took a job as a receptionist in a nursing agency. By 1980, he had opened his own home-health-care-services company. “The man he had a relationship with died,” Aunt Dot told me, filling in the blanks that Daniels intentionally kept in his life story. “And he left Lenny money. He used that money to start his business. But even then, Lenny was reaching for the stars. He was always wanting to get into movies.” Daniels maintains that he inherited only a small amount of money and that his business was already thriving. In 1983, he sold it and went to work as a casting agent and then a manager. “An early client was Nastassja Kinski,” Daniels said. “I was always good: If you sign with me, baby, I’ll get you a paycheck. But I got tired of holding purses on the red carpet. I was creating actors, but I was stifling myself.” He had read a script for one of his clients, a white actor named Wes Bentley, called “Monster’s Ball,” and he decided to raise the money and produce it. “Just like that,” Daniels recalled. “I had a 90-day option to raise the money for ‘Monster’s Ball,’ and on the 90th day, I had the money.”

This mix of fearlessness, determination and salesmanship has fueled Daniels’s career. “Lee is right in your face,” explains Bob Berney, with admiration. “And to some people, he’s scary. Not to me, but I still felt I had to say yes to him. Look at who he got to pay for ‘Precious’ — you can’t imagine a more improbable, impossible thing. They’re a lovely suburban couple. I’m sure they’d never have reached this level of success in the film business so quickly without Lee.”

When I first met Daniels in 2004, we had lunch in the meeting hall of the United House of Prayer for All People, near his former office in Harlem. He moved to New York nine years earlier, and he was living half in Harlem, half on the Upper West Side, with Billy Hopkins and their two kids. Daniels’s children were born to a brother and his girlfriend. “The babies were left on Lenny’s mother’s doorstep,” Aunt Dot recalled. “And she called social services to come get them. But Lenny stepped in. Those babies are now his and Billy’s.” This year, Daniels and Hopkins broke up and now share custody — the kids now spend four days a week on the Upper West Side with Hopkins and three days with Daniels and his boyfriend, Andy Sforzini, an actuary at Prudential Life Insurance. “They’ve been to more bar mitzvahs than they’ve been to church,” Daniels told me. “They’re these black kids living around these Upper West Side Jews. They’ve read ‘Anne Frank’ a hundred times, and they’ve never read ‘Roots.’ ” When I asked if the kids see their biological father, Daniels said: “No. My brother hates that I’m raising his kids. He’s so humiliated by the fact that I’m gay that he won’t look me in the eye.”

About his sexuality, Daniels is both defiant and deliberately provocative. “I’d prefer to be bisexual,” he told me at the Staghorn. “But I don’t think any woman is going to accept me being with a man. I had to choose. And I did. But there’s a deep connection with me and women. They listen to me. I understand them better than I understand men.”

“Shadowboxer,” released in 2006, was an attempt to fuse Daniels’s past with his present — the film tried to combine the machismo of his upbringing with a gay sensibility. “It was an anarchic shoot,” Mirren recalled enthusiastically. “Lee was learning on the set. He loved the designer Vivienne Westwood, and he told me, ‘You’re going to wear Vivienne Westwood!’ I said, ‘Why would a contract killer living in Philly wear Vivienne Westwood?’ But the why was irrelevant.”

While he was editing “Shadowboxer,” Daniels, who was living on 17th Street at the time, went for a run by the piers on the West Side. He felt a little ping in his chest. The pain increased, and by the time he arrived at his office in Harlem, he had to lie down. His assistant persuaded him to go to the doctor, who immediately realized Daniels was having a heart attack. “I’d been using a lot of cocaine. I’m embarrassed to say this, but I had to learn to bring down my bravado. When you’re finding yourself in the world, you start blinging and dinging and dingdingdang dang, and next thing you know, you’re in the hospital.”

He said that the heart attack changed him, that it was part of the reason he felt he had to make “Precious.” Unlike “Shadowboxer,” “Precious” is a world without glitz, glamour — or, for the most part, men. Daniels convinced his actresses to leave their vanity behind. “I asked Mo’Nique to grow a couple of pimples,” Daniels recalled. “And I asked her not to shave under her arms, and she went there for me.” Mariah Carey’s role was originally offered to Helen Mirren, who had scheduling conflicts. Carey and Daniels are close friends — he calls her Kitten, and she calls him Cotton — and he offered her the part on the condition that she show up at the set alone (no entourage) in a taxi (no limo) and freshly scrubbed (no makeup). “People say to me, ‘You are so ugly in this movie,’ and I take that as a compliment,” Carey told me. “During the filming, I tried to sneak some blush, but Lee caught me. He rubbed my cheek and said, ‘Take that off.’ I said, ‘But Precious is wearing makeup!’ ”

When Daniels wanted a fantasy sequence to be a Vogue photo shoot starring Precious and the magazine's editor at large, André Leon Talley, Talley looked at a clip of Sidibe from the movie and declined. Daniels fired some crew members halfway through production (“They weren’t listening to me, and I said, don’t let this hair fool you, give me what I want”), and the production ran out of money twice. Carey helped out by singing at Daniels’s house to dazzle potential investors. “I would do anything for Lee,” she said. “He can strip you down, homely you out, and you trust him, because he’s after the truth. He can drive you crazy, but what interesting person doesn’t drive you crazy?”

V.

WHEN DANIELS WAS getting up to accept the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January, his cellphone rang, and it was Oprah Winfrey. She was calling to tell him that she had seen “Precious,” that the movie “split her open” and that she wanted to put her might behind the film. “I said, ‘I’m accepting an award right now,’ ” Daniels recalled. “She said, ‘Then why are you answering your phone?’ ”

After winning three awards, “Precious” was finally bought by a distributor. “I had shown the movie in L.A. to my manager, and he didn’t respond positively,” Daniels said. “My manager, who is white, said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think anybody is going to see this movie.’ That man is no longer my manager.”

Daniels paused. It was late September, we were back at the Staghorn and he had just returned from the Toronto Film Festival, where “Precious” won the audience prize, traditionally an indicator of awards and box-office glory (last year, the winner was “Slumdog Millionaire”). In a week, “Precious” would be the centerpiece selection at the New York Film Festival.

“I decided I should cut my hair,” Daniels said, running his hand over his closely cropped head. The dreadlocks were gone. Daniels no longer looks like a wild child, but older, more sober. “I’m in another place right now,” he said. “I realize I don’t have to sing a song or dance a dance just to make my dream come true. I’ve got Oprah!”

Winfrey’s involvement with “Precious” was encouraged by Tyler Perry, perhaps the most successful African-American in the movie business, who joined her as an executive producer. The subject matter of the film resonated with both of them: Winfrey has spoken often about the sexual abuse she suffered as a young girl, and earlier this month, Perry described being mercilessly beaten by his father. With two of the biggest forces in black entertainment involved, Lionsgate bought “Precious” for $5.5 million. They might have wanted to keep Perry happy: in the last four years, Lionsgate, which distributes Tyler Perry’s films, has sold more than $400 million in tickets. Perry’s movies, which are rooted in comedy but have dramatic elements, are mostly about successful, largely middle-class black women with the same issues as their white counterparts: wayward men, complex marriages, difficult children.

“My mom loves Tyler Perry’s movies,” Daniels said. “She prefers his films to mine. Tyler is the polar opposite from me as a filmmaker. His work speaks to people who want to live in that Huxtable/Cosby world. We’ve had such a difficult time as a race of people, why not live in Tyler Perry’s world?” Daniels ordered his usual steak. “Whether you’re white, black or anything else, it’s hard to look truth in the face,” Daniels continued. “And, thank God, Tyler Perry was man enough to acknowledge the truth of ‘Precious’ and embrace it. There’s only one African-American success story in movies, and that’s Tyler Perry. I want to bring my DNA into that machine so I can make some money.”

Daniels seemed to be joking, but he did not laugh. “You know,” he said finally, “I didn’t think Obama was going to win. My kids called me a racist. They said, ‘You’re out of touch.’ ” And then I met Obama at an event in Santa Barbara. He was with Michelle. And Michelle! She is sexy. When I met Obama, I realized I’d been prejudiced by years of feeling unworthy. And that’s the message of ‘Precious.’ My world is dark, but the light is coming on.”

VI.

AT THE NEW YORK Film Festival, Daniels was nervous. With the exception of Mo’Nique, who decided to stay in Atlanta, his entire cast was there. Sidibe was resplendent in a long purple gown with a plunging neckline, and Lenny Kravitz, who was living in Paris at the time, headed to New York on the Queen Mary and attended the Saturday-night screening at Alice Tully Hall. Daniels’s next film is likely to be “Iced,” the story of a crack-addicted, Harvard-educated lawyer, starring Kravitz. “Lee has made himself a part of my life,” Kravitz told me. “After we met a few years ago, he visited me on tour. He rode the bus. And then, when I was back in New York, he started coming over for dinner all the time. This summer, he was staying with my cousins in the Bahamas, finishing a script. He has become part of my family.”

Around his cast, Daniels was ebullient. But earlier in the day, at a news conference following a screening of the movie, he was restrained and self-conscious. The questions were not particularly compelling, but Daniels, dressed in a three-piece suit, answered as if he were on a diplomatic mission. It was as if he had been coached to treat “Precious” as an Important Film With Major Intentions. His answers were polite, careful and flat. Finally, one journalist asked him if he was trying to cast an overly harsh light on inner-city life. “I always look for that gray area,” Daniels said, sounding like his old dreadlocked self. “Even the most evil person was somebody’s baby at one time. And that’s where life is lived. I’ve never been that comfortable with black and white.”

Lynn Hirschberg is editor at large for the magazine.