Lee Tamahori

Lee Tamahori won acclaim with his first feature film in 1994, an adaptation of the Alan Duff novel Once Were Warriors. Tamahori had worked in the New Zealand film industry for more than a decade before Warriors made his name. Since then he has directed movies largely beyond New Zealand shores - including James Bond blockbuster Die Another Day, and thriller The Edge.

Tamahori was born in Wellington in 1950, the self-styled ‘hybrid' child of a European mother and Māori father. He began his career as a commercial artist and photographer. Tamahori joined the film industry in the late 1970s, initially getting in the door by working for nothing. He scored jobs as a boom operator for Television New Zealand, and on 1978 feature Skin Deep.

Tamahori went on to work as a boom operator on Kiwi classics Goodbye Pork Pie and Bad Blood, before Geoff Murphy offered him the chance to work as an assistant director on Utu. Tamahori worked alongside a number of top New Zealand directors in the first assistant director role, on films like The Silent One, The Quiet Earth and Came a Hot Friday.

Finding no luck getting directing jobs, in 1986 Tamahori co-founded long-running commercial production company Flying Fish. He has directed more than 100 commercials to date, including a number of award winners. His work includes memorable advertisements for Fernleaf butter, the bungy-jumping fisherman for Instant Kiwi and a star-studded Commonwealth Games commercial, set during World War One.

Advertisements aside, Tamahori's first venture into drama came in 1989, when he directed an episode of Māori-driven drama series E Tipu E Rea - Thunderbox. Thunderbox is a comic-tinged tale of a father and son trying to get along in the 
Pakeha world. Tamahori followed it with episodes of anthology series The Ray Bradbury Theatre.

His big break as a director came with Once Were Warriors (1994). The film went on to outgross Jurassic Park on its New Zealand release, and win audiences, acclaim and awards around the world.

Shot in a style that mixes gritty realism with bold use of colour, Once Were Warriors examined a world of domestic violence and gangs for an urban Māori family. The movie's unflinching depictions of the former matched Tamahori's desire for films that evoke a response: films that "make you reel out of the theatre and you have to go to a bar and have a drink."

Time magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald both rated Warriors one of the ten best films of the year. Entertainment Weekly reviewer Wade Major found it "among the most devastatingly powerful motion pictures ever made."

Warriors now ranks as the second highest grossing New Zealand film at the NZ box office (The World's Fastest Indian later overtook first position, though inflation-adjusted figures still put Warriors ahead).

Following Tamahori's first feature, this longtime fan of American film left New Zealand to work in Hollywood. His debut feature in America was 50s crime thriller Mulholland Falls (1996), which saw Tamahori working alongside American actors Nick Nolte, John Malkovich and legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler. Tamahori later argued that the film was damaged after he bowed to studio pressure to shorten it.

Since then, Tamahori's work has included the David Mamet-scripted The Edge (1997), Next (2007), with Nicolas Cage, an episode of acclaimed drama The Sopranos, and the second most successful James Bond film to date, Die Another Day (2002).