'Precious' scribe blooms in new gig as director

Geoffrey Fletcher had one of the most auspicious feature film debuts in recent memory, winning an Oscar for scripting “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” in 2009.

Friday sees the release of Fletcher’s long-awaited follow-up, his feature directorial debut “Violet & Daisy.”

The film, which Fletcher also scripted, follows teenage assassins, played by Saoirse Ronan and Alexis Bledel, who traverse a surreal New York cityscape and wind up in the apartment of a sad sack target played by James Gandolfini.

It’s a stylized, pulpy portrait of off-kilter teen friendship, a movie that the 42-year-old filmmaker says is inspired by graphic novels, American films from the ’70s and more.

Both “Precious” and “Violet & Daisy” are “coming of age stories about young women in difficult environments in New York City and they both have moments of humor, strife, joy, fright and humanity,” Fletcher says.

“One of my interests seems to be the collision between innocence and the hard realities of the world,” he adds.

And NYC is the perfect place to explore that theme.

“New York has this incredible ability to make one feel extremely hopeful, and it also has the ability to make one feel despair,” Fletcher says. “I think that those extremes account for this being such an otherworldly yet grounded place that lends itself very nicely to these stories.”