By Ryan Steal
Lee Daniels, the director of the Oscar-winning 2009 film, Precious, announced some new changes he has made in the film. Daniels mentioned that he sent his white crew home because they couldn’t light the Black actors’ skin properly.
Daniels made these revelations during a reunion with the film’s star actor, Gabourey Sidibe, at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Daniels said: “I had a white line producer, a white AD, they also read [reviews that said my last film] Shadowboxer was the worst film ever made, and they had zero respect for me, my vision, or what it was. They were New Yorkers that looked at this as a job.”
Daniels said he was forced to fire everybody after feeling that his white actors were disrespectful and that their job wasn’t impressive. This happened just 20 days into production.
“I kept coming home like, this doesn’t feel right, she doesn’t look right, the set looks weird. I felt like I was giving birth to an alien, literally, so I did something that I now don’t even know whether I’d have the courage to do, but I fired everybody. I shut it down… They were all white guys, just rude, disrespectful, really rude to what I wanted to do,” the filmmaker added.
Daniels went on to say that the decision to fire the white actors was made blindly and without consideration of whether it would take a financial toll on them.
Sidibe also complained that her original cinematographer on “Precious” didn’t know how to light her skin. “Every now and then, I might run into a DP that doesn’t know how to light the variance of Black and brown skin, and that was one of the major problems with him,” Sidibe said about the cinematographer.
Andrew Dunn, who had shot The Madness of King George and The Bodyguard, is now set to replace the DP. “I’d seen ‘The Madness of King George,’ and I loved the way he shot it,” Daniels said of Du
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