Lee Tamahori talks to Helen Barlow about returning to New Zealand to direct the family saga, Mahana.

It has been more than 20 years since Lee Tamahori put Maori cinema on the world stage with 1994's Once Were Warriors. After Warriors, went to Hollywood to fulfil his boyhood dream.
He made the well-regarded gangster yarn Mulholland Falls and eventually Die Another Day, which remains one of the biggest-grossing Bond films.
Now, with the backing of Warriors producer Robin Scholes, he has returned to New Zealand film-making with Mahana, based on Whale Rider author Witi Ihimaera's semi-auobiographical novel, Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies.
It tells the tale of the sheep-shearing East Coast Mahana family and their rivalry with the Poata clan. Meanwhile, patriarch Tamihana Mahana (Temuera Morrison) is caught in a battle of wills with his teenage grandson Simeon (newcomer Akuhata Keefe), and shares an uneasy relationship with his wife and the whanau's matriarch Ramona (Nancy Brunning).
Mahana is featured on the cover of this week's TimeOut:
"Returning to this style of film-making is part of a plan I've had for a long time," Tamahori admits.
"When I made Mulholland Falls I was immediately thrust into an overseas high-pressure environment, but I always knew I was never going to stay in it because I love what independent film-making allows, and the American studio environment doesn't do that anymore."
It had been Scholes' dream to bring Bulibasha to the screen. "It's the most extraordinary and filmic novel," she says, and she knew it would be a perfect for Tamahori to direct.
Continued below.

Related Content

Lee Tamahori on the set of Mahana. Photo / Supplied
Lee Tamahori on the set of Mahana. Photo / Supplied
"We just took every step to make that happen. Lee is kind of coming back to his roots but also I knew that in his personal life his mum and dad were ill and, over the course of the film's development, they in fact died. So for him, it was also an honouring of that generation, because he had such a great upbringing. Then I got Lee and Witi together because they share this common history of where their grandfathers and fathers grew up - and that sealed the deal."
For Tamahori it made sense to put some distance between his two Maori films.
"Once I made Once Were Warriors, they kept expecting me to be doing the dysfunctional Maori family story," the 65-year-old says. "One might say that this is another Maori dysfunctional family story but it's not, really. It's more of a nostalgic piece for me because it's about the time when I was growing up."
"Simeon, the young man at the centre of it, is only about five years older than I was during this period on the East Coast area where my father is from. As you do with films like this, you put little bits of your own life into it. I did it in Warriors and I did it with this one."

This story although having a difference from mine I found a common ground with the need to show where and when it was filmed my film also relates to the Importance of not what is showing but the actual story behind it. Placement of where and when is important to my work.