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Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand director of Once Were Warriors and Die Another Day, has died aged 75.
In a statement to Radio New Zealand, Tamahori’s family said he had Parkinson’s and died “peacefully at home”.
They added: “His legacy endures with his whānau [family], his mokopuna [grandchild], every film-maker he inspired, every boundary he broke, and every story he told with his genius eye and honest heart.
“A charismatic leader and fierce creative spirit, Lee championed Māori talent both on and off screen … We’ve lost an immense creative spirit.”
Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1950, of mixed Maori and British ancestry, Tamahori worked his way up through the Australian and New Zealand film industry in the 1970s and 80s, crewing on a number of films for Geoff Murphy (including Goodbye Pork Pie and The Quiet Earth) and acting as first assistant director for Nagisa Oshima on the high-profile international production Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.
Tamahori broke into directing features with Once Were Warriors, a tough drama about the brutality of life for a Māori family struggling to survive in Auckland. On its release in 1994 it became New Zealand’s highest grossing film and went on to make an international impact. As a result, Tamahori was hired to make period noir Mulholland Falls, starring Nick Nolte and Chazz Palminteri, to moderate acclaim and box office.
However, Tamahori was now considered a reliable Hollywood operator, making the survival thriller The Edge, featuring Anthony Hopkins opposite Bart the bear in a script by David Mamet, and Along Came a Spider, a James Patterson thriller starring Morgan Freeman.
He then took on his most high-profile job, the Bond film Die Another Day, which would become famous for its invisible car and Halle Berry’s orange bikini. It would also prove to be Pierce Brosnan’s last outing as 007, before the reins were handed over to Daniel Craig. As Tamahori himself noted, the advent of the Bourne franchise ended up making the Brosnan era look a little old-fashioned, but the film proved a hit with audiences on its release in 2002, if not necessarily with critics.
After Bond, Tamahori went on to another putative blockbuster sequel, XXX: State of the Union starring Ice Cube, after the original’s star Vin Diesel dropped out. He then made Nic Cage sci-fi thriller Next and political fable The Devil’s Double, about Saddam Hussein’s son Uday and his body double, both played by Dominic Cooper.
Tamahori subsequently returned to New Zealand to make Mahana, based on Witi Ihimaera’s novel Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies, about a fictional Māori patriarch, in which he cast his Once Were Warriors lead actor Temuera Morrison. Saying it was shot as a “western, specifically a 1950s American western”, Tamahori was phlegmatic at its failure at the box office in its home country. “It’s a period film about a bygone era and it deals with the older generation, so young people didn’t go and see it.”
In 2024 he released The Convert, starring Guy Pearce as a British missionary who becomes involved with local Māori.
