Precious director hails Jewison as mentor

Lee Daniels, the Academy Award-nominated director of  Precious, hailed Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison as a role model who inspired a generation of black directors at a panel discussion in Toronto

Jewison made his 1967 film In the Heat of the Night at a time when the issue of race in the U.S. was almost buried.

His courage in creating a black detective, played by Sidney Poitier, who expects respect from others was an inspiration, Daniels said Tuesday.

Daniels was taking part in a panel discussion with Jewison about the way black people are portrayed in film. The talk at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto was moderated by Toronto filmmaker Clement Virgo, director of Poor Boy's Game and episodes of the HBO series  The Wire.

"There were no role models that I could really identify with, and I think that Mr. Jewison, with In the Heat of the Night and A Soldier's Story — his movies changed my life," Daniels said.

He recalled seeing In the Heat of the Night with family when still a boy and thinking, "That is what I want to do."

In the Heat of the Night, which won five Oscars, made such an impact because its depiction of relations between the races was truthful, he said.

"He ain't black. And so, what does that say that someone who isn't from my existence can create the same world," Daniels said. "I hope that I can do the same and inspire other kids in same way that he inspired me."

Daniels, 50, nominated for best director for Precious, is only the second black director to get an Oscar nomination in that category, after John Singleton, who was nominated in 1992 for Boyz 'N the Hood.

But Daniels doesn't see his colour as a hindrance in the film business and believes opportunities to tell stories about black characters are improving.

"What I hope will come out of it is conversations that will inspire young African-American children to pick up a camera and do what I was afraid to do when I was a kid," he said.

On stage, Jewison, now 83, talked about his appalling discovery of segregation when he travelled through the southern U.S. in 1946, wearing his navy uniform.

"I couldn't understand why a country would ask young men to go and fight and die for America and then when they came home they had to sit on the back of the bus and couldn't get a cup of coffee at Woolworth's," he told the crowd at the Canadian Film Centre, which he helped found.

A couple of decades later Jewison's indignation was when he had Poitier return the slap of a wealthy white murder suspect in the film.

"I didn't know it at the time, but this was a slap that was heard around the world," said Jewison. "I found out that a black man had never slapped a white man ... in an American film at that time."

Daniels said that he admires Jewison because his filmmaking was so honest.

"The truth upsets a lot of people, and so through his work, I've learned to tell the truth in my work, and that's hard to do," he said.

Daniels is taking heat himself from some African-Americans about Precious, a tragic but inspiring story of a black teenager in Harlem who is pregnant after being raped by her father and faces constant abuse from her jealous, mean-spirited mother.   

"'How dare you show the white man this,'" Daniels says they tell him. "'We fought so hard to be Obama. How dare you show where we're coming from.' It's not black — it's Chinese, it's Canadian, it's Jewish. Incest shows no race."