Lee Daniels Laid Off White Crew Member For Being 'Disrespectful' While Filming 'Precious': 'Really Rude'

Director Lee Daniels had to fire a "disrespectful" white crew member during the filming of the Oscar-winning movie "Precious."

The 61-year-old director attended the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) with Gabourey Sidibe on Tuesday and opened up about his experience on the sets of the 2009 movie.

He said some of the crew members on the sets of "Precious" were disrespectful toward him as his previous movie, "Shadowboxer," didn't do well at the box office and received negative reviews. "They had zero respect for me, my vision, or what it was," he recalled. "They were New Yorkers that looked at this as a job."

"I kept coming home like, this doesn't feel right, she doesn't look right, the set looks weird," he explained. "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."

In an interview shared by the Twitter handle of TIFF on Tuesday, Daniels said he was "nervous about making sure that she was lit beautifully. It didn't feel right," while Sidibe wiped away her tears as the director explained his struggle. "Whether we were going to take a financial hit because of it, I just blindly shut it down."

The movie was made on a $10 million budget and it earned $64 million. Daniels recalled hiring cinematographer Andrew Dunn as he had loved the latter's work in "The Madness of King George."

"I asked him, 'I need your help because my DP is disrespectful.' They were all white guys, just rude, disrespectful, really rude to what I wanted to do, not knowing I was going to shut it all down," he said.

Sharing her experience working on the movie, Sidibe said the original DP (director of photography) had "no idea" how to work with Black skin tone and due to that, she often "looked green" in the movie.

"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," she added.

"Precious" also starred Mo'Nique, Mariah Carey, Paula Patton and Lenny Kravitz.

Daniels will direct the comedy-drama "Terms of Endearment" next, while Sidibe will feature in a TV series, "The Harper House," which is currently under post-production.