As provocative films go, the one Lee Daniels decided to make about a 350-pound, abused, illiterate Harlem teenaged girl didn’t scare him that much. After all, he had already produced the Oscar-winning Monster’s Ball, which involved both family tragedy and interracial love, and The Woodsman, whose main character was a pedophile. His lone previous directorial venture, Shadowboxer, featured stepmother and stepson assassins who were also lovers. So, feeling particularly drawn to his new subject, the producer hired himself to direct the film, the full title of which is Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Then he hired pop singer Mariah Carey, rocker Lenny Kravitz, and comedian Mo’Nique to play key dramatic roles. For the title character, named Claireece “Precious” Jones, he found a young actor who, save for an amateur play or two, had never actually acted before.

Precious, as it happens, has been living up to its name nicely, winning prizes at film festivals from San Sebastián to Toronto, including both the audience award and the grand jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Now the Oscar buzz for the film (opening Friday [November 27]) is getting ever, well, buzzier. Despite the fact that this is all undeniably excellent news, Daniels frets—or at least feigns fretting—about such breathless anticipation.

“With awards, people expect so much and it really is just a little movie,” Daniels said one afternoon last month, sitting in a hotel bar while in town to introduce Precious at the Vancouver International Film Festival. “I just want people to embrace the story. My cousin in San Francisco says, ‘This movie better be good with all the buzz I’m hearing,’ and I go, ‘Ohhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhh.’ ” For effect, the director convincingly mimed a pain in the vicinity of his heart.

It started when a friend told Daniels he must read Push, the 1996 novel by single-monikered author Sapphire. He found himself gripped by the harrowing yet hopeful story of the obese and abused inner-city 16-year-old, pregnant with her second child from rape by her father and in serious need of intervention. “The book was staggeringly powerful,” he recalled. “It reminded me of early childhood memories and people that I knew in my youth. I grew up in Philadelphia, but the ghetto is the ghetto is the ghetto.”

Daniels said he interviewed 400 girls before he found the right one. “I stopped counting after 400,” he said. “I started by calling an agent in Hollywood and asking, ‘Do you have a 300- or 400-pound girl?’ They’d be like, ‘Click.’ I knew then that I had to find her on the streets.”

In the end, Gabourey Sidibe, a young Brooklyn psychology student, appeared not in a New York subway station or a McDonald’s lineup, as Daniels imagined, but on a casting agent’s tape. “She blew me away. Her first acting job ever. She’d done something in high school like Cinderella or something,” he said, highly amused. As Precious, the charismatic Sidibe is rather Cinderella-like, although the princess-to-be never stole buckets of fried chicken or had frying pans flung at her noggin.

Because Daniels isn’t a man who subscribes to anyone’s idea of conventional casting, he thought it perfectly reasonable to cast Mariah Carey as a welfare caseworker. Despite the pop star’s “gazillionaire” status, he refused her any say in her character’s appearance.

“Mariah and Lenny are my friends. They knew I had their backs,” he said. Having her back apparently meant dyeing Carey’s hair a flat brown, putting bags under her eyes, and, for a moment, considering giving her a false nose. “I wanted her to look heinous!” he said happily. “And she knows it. I bound her boobs. Then I took a pencil and made it look like she had a mustache.” Minus the fake schnoz, in the film Carey is a compellingly believable social worker.

Daniels shot his movie on New York’s streets in five-and-a-half weeks. He didn’t have permits. “Are you crazy?” he asked rhetorically. “No! No!” Although after Sundance he had the executive-producer backing of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, just then he was busy being illegal. “We were running from the law. We were run off sets and run off locations. It was embarrassing!”

In its remarkable superstar life on-screen thus far, Daniels’s film has found audiences in places the director hadn’t expected. “I thought I was telling the story of this disenfranchised African-American girl and I found out once I hit Sundance, all these white people were responding to it, that it was really a universal story,” he said. “Because no one thinks they’re beautiful enough. The inner beauty of Precious is what sort of is the story.”

Daniels is still getting something of a kick out of the fact that Precious happened at all. “Everything worked. In a weird way on an odd movie that on paper no one would think would work. Ever.” Because he is nothing if not a showman, he added, laughing and with increasing volume that caused nearby drinkers to turn their heads, “Ever! Ever!”