For 'Precious' director Lee Daniels, it's personal

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 West Philly apartment in the tough 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, color the scenes.

Now with the powerful imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, "Precious," adapted from the 1996 novel "Push" by writer/performance artist Sapphire, will have its coming out party at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday night, before landing in theaters in November. It will be the film that divides Daniels' directing career into before and after -- where "before" held promise, "after" will come with expectations.

"Precious" throws open a window into a world that most of us never see, would rather pretend doesn't exist. This place, where women and children are beaten down verbally and physically, where life is disposable, is one that Daniels knows well. His need to examine the rippling effect of those experiences is nothing new. 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 largely overlooked "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. "I love my mother, cherish her. She had many, many things thrown at her in life, hard things; and I watched it, watched her remain this stoic figure that carried on."