Screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher talks about the road to ‘Precious'

As Geoffrey Fletcher himself describes it, he had been trying to get into the feature-film world "for years and years and years."

Fletcher, now 39 and living in New York City, started playing with cameras when he was a youngster growing up in Waterford. He studied film in the graduate program at NYU. He has written thousands of pages of original material.

He kept hoping that feature-film opportunities would open up even as he would occasionally find himself wondering if they really would.

"There were some very difficult times where I would ask myself, 'What am I doing? Will I ever get an opportunity to make a feature film - any film, even a film that would vanish?'" he says.

And now it's happened. He wrote a screenplay for a feature film. But not just any film - a film that has been garnering the kind of universal praise that moviemakers fantasize about.

The movie is "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire," and it's become the most talked-about film of the season. The gritty drama - about an illiterate, overweight teenager who is abused by her mother and impregnated by her father - was called a "risky, remarkable film adaptation" by The New York Times. It won both the audience and grand jury prizes at the Sundance Film Festival.

After viewing the movie, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry were so moved, they signed on as executive producers.

And Oscar buzz is already building.

Fletcher says, "None of this was expected. I just knew that working on the book early on that this was something I very much cared about."

Reading Sapphire's book, he was hooked from the opening quote and in love with the main character, he says, maybe from page 2.

Fletcher was approached to do the screen adaptation by "Precious" director Lee Daniels after he saw a 23-minute film that Fletcher had written, directed, shot and edited. It was a surreal love story inspired by old films, both foreign and American.

Fletcher, who majored in psychology at Harvard, might not seem an obvious choice for the project, but he sees a universality in Precious' story.

"She wants the same things we all want - she wants to love, she wants to be loved, and she wants to contribute. Who among us really doesn't want those things?

"In addition to that, she also feels like such an outsider. She feels sort of discarded and underestimated, and I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who hasn't felt that way.

"I certainly felt that way. I felt very much on the outside for struggling for years, just writing, writing, writing thousands of pages with no guarantee of anything, but just knowing that this was my passion. I felt it was a calling. I knew I may never get the chance, yet I couldn't stop trying," he says.

Fletcher says he wrote the "Precious" screenplay with an unusual amount of freedom and encouragement.

Translating a book into a movie meant making some changes, of course. (Fletcher didn't get any feedback from author Sapphire).

Fletcher created the fantasies that Precious retreats into when she's facing great stress. Those sequences also provide the audience with an escape at tough moments.

Beyond that, Fletcher says he thought it was "a very organic and grounded way to add another visual element, a cinematic element to the story. My formal training in filmmaking is as a director, so throughout the writing process, I'm always mindful of ways to make the experience as visual and cinematic as possible."

Fletcher altered other things, including expanding the role of a male nurse (played by rocker Lenny Kravitz). In the novel, the character is only mentioned in a sentence or two.

"I thought it would be great to have him be a significant part of the story, for a few reasons," Fletcher says. "The only male characters in it are her father, who was a horrible memory of the past, and a young man who exists in her fantasies. But to have a man who is kind, intelligent and caring in her current reality, I thought, was very important because: A) those men do exist; B) as she is shaping her world view and realigning her perspective, he is an important character to have in her reality."

Fletcher wasn't on the set during the actual filming. He was busy teaching at Columbia and NYU and writing a new movie. (He describes the new project as a dark coming-of-age story, mixed with criminal elements.)

Watching the completed version of "Precious" for the first time was a cause for relief and joy for Fletcher.

"I was so close to the project, I was really concerned because I feared that material that was this sensitive and provocative could easily have gone very wrong. I was thrilled the first time I saw it and very happy that it came out as it did," he says.

Fletcher is the youngest of three sons born to Bettye and the late Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Geoffrey Fletcher says that, in his family, there were always expectations but never pressure. He says his parents "were always very supportive and encouraging. I felt that they invested so much in us. ... I wanted to do something with all that they had given me."

Since "Precious" has become a sensation, Fletcher has experienced a few "Hollywood" moments, most recently when he was backstage at a Los Angeles screening, and he was standing in the cramped space between Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry and Mariah Carey (who acts in "Precious"), waiting to be called out in front of the audience.

He says that Winfrey is "very kind and gracious and alert, and I find that to be the case for Oprah and Tyler Perry and Mariah Carey. All of them have that in common, which I find fascinating."

The whole "Precious" experience has been, of course, a whirlwind. Fletcher acknowledges there are days when it all feels a bit surreal.

"I'm still amazed the movie got made. I'll be able to really assess it maybe a year from now. ... Even though I've been working toward it for so long, all the attention the film has gotten, it's still tempered by trying daily to figure out the next project. That's a full-time job as well. It helps keep it tempered and balanced," he says.

"I'm grateful for each and every opportunity. I'm grateful and humbled."

k.dorsey@theday.com