Precious Director Lee Daniels Confesses: 'We Laughed From Beginning to End'

The lawsuit-inspiring, diva-boasting darling Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire makes landfall in New York this weekend, when its appearance as the New York Film Festival's centerpiece selection marks its first American exposure since dominating Sundance last January. Director Lee Daniels greeted the festival press Thursday at Lincoln Center, where his transfixing blend of fantasy, terror, incest, abuse and urban aspiration screened to acclaim, gasps and plenty of tears. After the ordeal of watching it, one could only imagine the ordeal of making it, right? Wrong, according to Daniels -- it was a blast! His explanation (and a few mild spoilers) after the jump.

"We didn't take ourselves seriously at all," the filmmaker said, responding to an inquiry about how he and his cast dealt with the subject matter's grim tone. "We laughed from beginning to end. On my sets, Mariah [Carey] is putting on Precious's makeup. Lenny Kravitz is helping the girls with costumes. With Mo'Nique, I had to keep her away from craft services. It's like putting on a play. So we never looked at it as something very, very, very serious. If we did, we would have been lost. So we kept laughing throughout."

Ironically, few elements in Precious defy laughter the way Mo'Nique's performance does. As the title character's mother Mary -- a physically and verbally abusive tyrant who stood by quietly as Precious's father raped the girl (twice making her pregnant) -- the comic dredges up a sneering, mind-blowing flair for movie monsterdom. For all the film's tonal shifts and turbulence, the raw dread of her turbaned, chain-smoking fury up every stairwell and around every corner supersedes anything distributor Lionsgate will package for its latest Saw installment.

Daniels said the actress was game for pretty much anything conceived for her character -- except for what's emerged as perhaps Precious's most notorious sequence, featuring Mary and her Down Syndrome-afflicted granddaughter.

"It was a very hard moment," Daniels recalled. "I said, 'Mo'Nique, throw the baby.' She said, 'What?' I said, 'I want you to throw the baby now.' It wasn't scripted, but I felt like we really needed to show the depth of the insanity. So she threw the baby -- this is Mongo, in the social worker scene -- and I had to cut out really quick because the grandmother broke down crying. She couldn't do it. I said, 'But the baby's having fun!' " Daniels made a loopy sound and waved his arms. "'So throw the baby.' That was a moment, but I think we laughed for the most part. We really, really did laugh."

Daniels and Mo'Nique's relationship goes back to his far lesser-achieving directorial debut Shadowboxer, where he said the two built trust during an intimate rehearsal process. "It's the funnest part of the job for me," he continued. "I talk about my fears and my insecurities, and I talk about my dislikes. We talk about sex. We talk about food. We talk about literature. Gossip. Before I yell 'Action,' we're on the same syllable. Not word. Syllable. My direction is really grunting, waving my hands around. I think for Mo'Nique, she had already had prior experience with me as a director. So she already knew we were on. We were one. I don't know how to describe it other than that."

Leading lady Gabourey Sidibe isn't half-bad either; she, too, was said to have embraced the lighter mood on set, even when it was at her expense.

"That's the genius of who Gabby Sidibe is as a talent," Daniels said. "When the boys push her on the floor? There's something, and we can't quite figure out what we're laughing. I'm laughing; Sapphire, the writer, is laughing. Everybody on the crew looked over like we're insane -- this is sad! And so I look over to Gabby, and I think maybe I shouldn't be laughing. Her shoulders were hunching. I went over to console her and say 'I'm sorry.' And she started laughing. I said, 'What are you laughing at?' She said, 'I'm a fat girl on the floor. What do you think?' And I thought that said a lot about who she was and how she attacked the character."

Expect to hear even more here about her, Mo'Nique, Daniels and the rest of the film as Precious approaches its Nov. 6 release date and, presumably, the Oscars ceremony next February.