Filmmaker Lee Daniels saw parts of his own life reflected back at him as he helmed the racially and sexually charged new thriller The Paperboy, which hits theatres on Friday.
Matthew McConaughey stars as Ward, a closeted gay journalist who returns to his hometown in Florida with writing partner Yardley (David Oyelowo) in the late 1960s. There, they probe whether creepy backwoods alligator hunter Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) was wrongly convicted of murder.
Zac Efron plays Ward's paperboy brother, Macy Gray co-stars as the family maid, and Oscar winner Nicole Kidman portrays a trashy bombshell who writes to prisoners - including Hillary - on death row.
"Each and every one of these people are people that either was my family member or a personal experience or best friend or someone that I know, and then I weave that, my life experience, in with the story," Daniels, who adapted the screenplay from the Pete Dexter novel, said during last month's Toronto International Film Festival.
The Oscar nominee for the harrowing 2009 film Precious noted his sister was like Kidman's character in that she's written to men in jail. He even had Kidman meet his sister as part of her research.
Daniels was also able to understand Cusack's character because his brother is in jail for murder.
The director, who is now raising his brother's children, saw bits of himself in the story, too.
"A little bit of Zac in me is in there with my underwear, running around listening to the Macy Gray character, who was like my aunt telling me what to do, who was a maid," said Daniels, who ran a health-care agency and was a talent manager before he produced and directed films.
"I'm in there with Yardley, because in the '80s I pretended to be something that I wasn't so I could get ahead as an African American; I pretended to go to Harvard and I was so embarrassed about the environment that I'd grown up in, and so that was me a little bit," continued the openly gay Philadelphia native.
"Matthew's character is based on a guy that I dated who committed suicide, because in the '70s he was from the south and it was hard enough being homosexual, but then also to have someone that was black, his parents ostracized him. And he caught HIV and he killed himself and he just was into dangerous sex."
Identifying with the material in his movies is essential for Daniels, who was the first sole African-American producer of an Oscar-winning film (Monster's Ball).
And he wants people to feel strongly about his films.
"There's no grey area," he said. "There's either I love it or I hate it and I think that's what you walk away with with my movies."
Such was the case when the The Paperboy had its world première at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and polarized critics with its provocative nature.
Among the film's bold scenes is one in which Kidman's character urinates on Efron's character to ease the pain of a jellyfish sting.
"Luckily I didn't have to get stung by jellyfish but the rest of it was pretty real," said the Disney-bred Efron of High School Musical fame, who also spends several scenes in just his underwear.
"Unless I took a step back and removed myself from the scene, I was able to grasp it and to make it true."
Kidman, meanwhile, had to shoot some wild and intimate scenes with Cusack, including one involving "air sex" in front of others in a jail visiting room.
Such content initially had Oyelowo reluctant to sign on, but once he saw Daniels' revisions to the script, he better identified with the characters.
"Someone somewhere said if this film had been made by Werner Herzog it would be deemed a masterpiece and I think that that's exactly true," said the British Oyelowo, whose other recent credits include Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and The Help.
"I think because people are not yet quite able to pin down Lee Daniels, and because he is shamelessly cinematic and shamelessly big with some of his choices and the way he pushes actors - and how dare he have the princess Nicole Kidman peeing? He pushes these boundaries that I think for cinematic intelligentsia, it can be a bit, 'Well, I don't know about that,' whereas audiences are just going to be like, 'Oh my, I have never seen anything like that before.' "
