Lee Tamahori: The Hollywood Interview

New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori.

LEE TAMAHORI:
ALONG CAME A FILMMAKER
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: The following is a compilation of two interviews I did with New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori, first in the September 1997 issue of Venice Magazine, then again in the April 2001 issue.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1950 to a Maori father and an anglo mother, Lee Tamahori was raised on a steady diet of hard-boiled American cinema. Films by directors such as Don Siegel (Dirty Harry), Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen), and Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) helped shape Tamahori's sensibilities as a straightforward teller of cinematic tales that deliver violence, machismo and antiquated codes of honor with the force of a sledgehammer.

Tamahori began his career as a commercial artist and photographer, then joined the neophyte New Zealand film industry in the late 1970's, working his way up as a crew member on such films as Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and Utu (both 1983). After cutting his teeth as a director of award-winning television commercials, Tamahori made an explosive feature debut with 1994's Once Were Warriors, a searing indictment of New Zeland's treatment of its native Maori people and the cycle of mysogynistic physical and mental abuse that plagues it. Recognizing this unique, visceral talent, Hollywood soon came calling to Tamahori's door, and like many foreigners, found his first trip to Tinseltown a disillusioning one. Mulholland Falls (1996) was meant to be a film noir, James Ellroy-esque fictionalized tale of the LAPD's infamous "hat squad" of the early 1950's. The film was taken from Tamahori and severely cut by its studio, rendering the final product a flawed work with a few striking moments that are shadows of what might have been. His next U.S. effort, The Edge, was a white-knuckle thriller starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as bitter enemies vying for the same woman who must survive the brutal Alaskan wilderness. With its script by David Mamet and intensity that could be cut with a knife, The Edge was a critical success, although not the box office hit that either Tamahori or Fox studios had hoped for.

After a couple of projects stalled before getting off the ground, Tamahori went back to his TV roots, directing a memorable episode of HBO's mega-hit The Sopranos. Soon, the feature world beckoned again, and this time, Tamahori landed himself another winner. Along Came a Spider is based on James Patterson's first Alex Cross novel, making this a "prequel" to 1997's Kiss the Girls. Morgan Freeman returns again as Cross, this time teaming with Monica Potter in search of a the kidnapped daughter of a powerful congressman. One of the few times a sequel outshines it predecessor, Along Came a Spider is a rock-solid thriller that will keep you guessing to the final scene, boasting top-notch work from Freeman, Potter and the always-riveting Michael Wincott.

Lee Tamahori is a wiry fellow who wears his silver hair in a spiky flattop, true to the tough-guy style of his heroes Siegel, Aldrich and Peckinpah. Over a generous room service tray, he sat down with Venice recently to talk about the genius of the aforementioned trio, doing a sequel, and why Morgan Freeman is the biggest joy in show business.

Tell me how you became interested in filmmaking.
Lee Tamahori: Sort of by accident. When I finished high school I went to work at an advertising agency to do commercial art, but they ruined any love I had for art and I went into photography. I learned all about cameras for a while, then went of and did my Hemingway bit and traveled enough to give me a broader prospective on life...then I returned home rather idle, and looking for something to do when the film industry in New Zealand started up, about 1976, or '77. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. In this country, everyone in film came from another profession, mechanics, engineers...because in New Zealand there's no established structure or training in film, like film schools.

What was the first job you got in film?
I was a boom operator, and I didn't even know what that was! A guy told me this job was available and I thought it was somebody who blew things up! So I thought if someone was going to pay you to make a movie, great! So I got very good at that and did it for four years. I was lucky enough to get approached by one of New Zealand’s best film directors, Geoff Murphy, and d he asked me to be the 1st assistant director on a movie he was making called Utu, which was the first big epic New Zealand ever produced, and was an assistant director for another four years. And after that I knew I'd wind up directing.

What was the film that made you fall in love with movies?
The Guns of Navarone, when I was 10 years old. It just blew me away, and from then I was hooked. And I really got hooked on a certain type of film after that. The more Bob Aldrich, Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah films I could see, the better. It was always really solid, professional, American testosterone movies! Especially Bob Aldrich. I think he's the unsung hero of American cinema. Everyone else always does the same thing, but Aldrich went off and did all these quirky things from The Killing of Sister George to Ulzana's Raid, which I still think is one of the great American westerns of all time.

What were you doing before you made Once Were Warriors?
Well, I said I wanted to direct around 1985, but no one leapt up and handed me a film to make. Big surprise! (laughs) So I started making TV commercials and I really got to love that and got good at it. I was doing humor and dramatic commercials, all with actors. You get pigeonholed in that business and I got pigeonholed as the guy who could work with actors and dialogue. So I was looking for a film to make...I didn't want to make a 'safe' movie and Warriors was an extraordinarily high-risk project. It came from a book, written by a Maori writer, won a whole heap of awards, very popular in New Zealand...the producer called me up and asked me if I wanted to direct it. I had read the book and said that I didn't see how you could make it into a movie. I thought it was too dark, too depressing...it was like a Fassbinder movie or something, you'd want to slit your wrists. (laughs) But the more he talked to me, the more I thought about what a risk and challenge it was...which is what filmmakers should do. Since it had such a powerful effect on people as literature, maybe it could have the same effect as a film. We changed a lot to make it more cinematic...I went to a Maori woman friend of mine who was a writer, because the screenplay had to be written from a woman's point of view, and worked on the screenplay with her. I concentrated on the visuals and she concentrated on the characters and the dialogue. It was a wonderful sort of collaboration.

Tell me about Mulholland Falls and how that came about.
I really liked the script because it was evocative of a genre that I loved, the hard-boiled detective story of the 50's. Even though the studio saw it as more of a big, violent picture with guns going off, I always saw it about this loner, the Nick Nolte character...I had recently become a fan of James Ellroy. And I thought what if we could put some of that Ellroy feel into this story...but it seems like Americans really don't dig that kind of genre anymore. Sort of like the western. I think if you want to do that kind of genre now, it's got to be reinvented as a modern film, with a modern spin on it to attract an audience...I'm still very proud of it even though I had to make changes on it that I regret enormously, which affected the film profoundly...the studio wanted it shorter. I always knew it was a two hour, plus movie. I was under a lot of pressure to take the whole front of the movie off, which I now regret so much. It introduced a lot of the main characters, showing them in Vegas watching nuclear explosions happen through windows of the casinos while they were drinking martinis...fascinating stuff. People perceived it as being a problem because we didn't get to the heroes fast enough...so the knife went down because they wanted it to move faster. That's the most common approach now with a film studio: faster, faster, faster! I thought "These are the guys paying me money, so I'd better do what they say." But now I really regret it. Maybe one of these days I'll do a director's cut with the complete 125 minute version.

Nick Nolte in Tamahori's Mulholland Falls (1996).

The thing about film noir that really made it work was that the filmmakers took their time telling the story.
Exactly! And that's what I tried to do, but the filmmaking style and pace has changed so much even since Chinatown in '74 that people get very, very nervous when a scene sits on a wide shot for 60 seconds or so and they say "Jesus, can't we cut away to something?!"

Let's talk about The Edge.
It was my Bob Aldrich picture (laughs). After the Mulholland experience, I really stuck to my guns on the battles I had on The Edge. I got notes like "There's too many vistas. Why are we spending time looking at these?" So I really dug my heels in this time and I had a great producer (Art Linson) and we both said "No, this is the story we want to make." Art's fantastic. There's a whole story to be told about guys like Art. He defends the material, he's uncompromising. It's why people like Mamet and De Niro and Sean Penn are his close friends. Lesser people than him will fold and cave in to protect their position. New filmmakers like me coming to America can get chewed up alive. I'm lucky to be working with people like Art.

Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in Tamahori's The Edge (1997).

One of the things that made The Edge work was its juxtaposition of tranquil shots of breathtaking vistas and then incredibly intense action sequences.
That's right. It has a rhythm to it and the rhythm is something you don't necessarily expect. It's something I tried on Warriors as well, which is kind of my Don Siegel picture. I always figured, here's this desperate story...I knew if a scene went on too long, the audience would get up and leave. But if it was cut so fast and so hard, the audience would just be nailed to their seats, and that's really an American action technique. With The Edge I tried to combine a bit of both.

I hope you take this the right way, but you shoot violence incredibly well.
Well I love violence in movies. I think movies are the perfect place for violence. When I saw The Wild Bunch, which is still my favorite film ever, it was so visceral and so unique, I've never seen another film that's made me feel so speechless or breathless. I remember staggering out of the theater and hanging onto a wall to try and get my breath. I thought "My God, a film has just done this to me." I had to go find a bar to have a drink! Sam Peckinpah got labeled as a "violence" director, when in fact his stories were really about the complexity of people's relationships...then in the 80's especially, you started to see all this mindless, cartoon violence, and I thought, no way am I gonna make one of those. With Warriors, this was about real violence, in your face. I had grown up amongst a lot of that, seen a lot of it in my sort of "young man drinking" days and, unlike Sam's stuff, I wanted to do it so fast and vicious and over before you know it with your cameras right in there amongst it with a certain style and selection of lenses so the audience has no choice but to get dragged along into this sort of screaming morass...something you should remember if you're ever doing this, the more you can pull of in one shot, the more horrible it's going to see, because subliminally the audience knows about cuts. But if it's all in one shot, it seems more real, more immediate and more visceral.

What was the genesis of The Edge?
I was actually in negotiations to direct a remake of Dial 'M' For Murder, when my agent got me a copy of David Mamet's screenplay, then called Bookworm. I couldn't put it down. So I said good-bye to the other project and jumped on with this one. Again, it was a risky project and that's what attracted me to it. It reminded me of something John Huston or Bob Aldrich would have made. They both used to examine the sort of strange bonding that goes on between men.

How was it working with Mamet?
Fantastic. David's directed a few films himself now so he really understands the relationship between the writer and director. At one point I went to him with a great deal of trepidation and said "David, I think there's a scene missing here." And he went off and wrote the new scene beautifully.

Did you feel like you were asking Michelangelo to repaint part of the Sistine Chapel?
Exactly! (laughs)

How were Hopkins and Baldwin?
Tony, to start with, was great. The funny thing is, he's really playing himself in this. He said as much. He said after years of playing very chameleon-like characters, this is the first script he's come across where the character is very much like him...very cultured, very well-read, very private. He was wonderful to work with, a fabulous individual. He loves film and the nature of what it can do. Some actors seem to hate the business, think it's all bullshit, to which I say "Then why the fuck are you in it?!" (laughs) There's a lot of good stories about Alec, but you can't print them. Alec's a very volatile character. He's a very difficult guy to get on with but he is, without exception, a very gifted and talented actor and that's all I wanted. He has a wonderful way of separating all the angst that's going on in his real life, and then immersing himself in his work. It was fascinating watching him and Tony working together, coming from two completely different perspectives, one a Method actor, the other this classically British trained RADA actor who just pretends. He's so gifted, Alec. He does really marvelous work in the film.

How long did you shoot in the Canadian Rockies (standing in for Alaska)?
A long time, about 13 weeks. We started at the end of summer, came out in winter. But I love (the wilderness). New Zealand’s not too dissimilar. I'm an ex-hunter, so I've done all that, been lost in the wilderness. I tried to impose some of my own experience onto the film, which was the environment. The environment, I thought, was the missing character in the original script. It's like David Lean time. You're going to take the actors and do it right in the right location so the film is sort of elevated.

Tell me about working with that bear.
About 95% of what you see in the film is a real bear, even though we had a major anamatronic bear built for the film, it never worked properly. I used it very sparingly for close stuff with the actors and so on. The real bear's name is Bart. He's 19 years old. He's the same one from the Jean-Jacques Annaud film The Bear. He's not friendly, they never are. But he's not aggressive, either. He just 1400 pounds of muscle and bone and very dangerous. You're not allowed near him...It's a wonderful sort of professional relationship. He comes out of his trailer, goes to his mark, does the take and goes back to his trailer. He's the John Wayne of bears, just phenomenal! (laughs) He and his trainer have this symbiotic relationship that's almost perverse. He has to stand in for Hopkins or Baldwin, or whoever else is in the scene with Bart.

Morgan Freeman, Dylan Baker, and Monica Potter in Tamahori's Along Came a Spider (2001).

Tell us about doing a sequel with Along Came a Spider.
Well with this film, and with all due respect to the first one, when they approached me I said 'We're up against it doing a sequel to Kiss the Girls. All people are gonna want is a rehash.' And for many reasons, many of which are my own, selfish reasons, I didn't want to go in there and do an also-ran of another movie. But I also wanted to make it really cool, so we can keep the Alex Cross series going, and hopefully put my own stamp on it in the process. In approaching it, I wanted to avoid the stamp of the "serial killer movie," which has denigrated into cheap thrills and a lot of stylish atmospherics, all created brilliantly by David Fincher (Seven). Even Kiss the Girls is kind of a clone of Seven. Everything on television now is a retread of that. It's all becoming a bit numbing. With Along Came a Spider, it's a kidnap story, which is really old hat, if you think about it. It doesn't have the same juice as a modern serial killer story. The films that made me want to be a filmmaker, and that still excite me, are things like Dirty Harry, Three Days of the Condor, Charley Varrick, all top-notch films, guys making movies at their best. They're exceptionally well-told stories that don't rely on things blowing up. The pace is just electrical and pulls you in, and won't let you go. So I consciously went back to the 70's and knew that if I was going to do a kidnapping picture, and not bore people, I had to keep the suspense as tight as possible, so I went back to the basic Don Siegel philosophy, the way he shot and cut films that kept you on the edge of your seat. And effectively, that's what we've done here. It's got a more ordinary, fundamental look. Mostly shot in daylight, not relying too heavily on atmospherics. It's more functional so people can focus on plot, character and where the story's going.

So you're not a fan of stylistics then?
Quite the opposite, I love stylistics when it doesn't draw attention to itself. Brian de Palma, for example, is brilliant stylistically and can still tell a great story. Even though he's made some terrible films, he's also done things like The Untouchables, with the Odessa steps sequence, and Carlito's Way, which is such a great fucking movie, that are just breathtaking. He gives them great style, but still remains invisible as he's doing so. People forget how good de Palma is, I think. But I think a lot of other films these days have gotten very lazy, and they try to fix their plot holes and their shonky parts with style.

Tell us about working with Morgan Freeman.
Just a joy. I told Morgan from the start that I don't shoot a lot of takes, because that wears us all out. I give them three goes at it, basically. Guys like Morgan and Tony Hopkins love that. They know how good they are, so they're always perplexed when you ask them to do take 27. (laughs) But they're also professional enough to do take 27 if you ask them to.

Monica Potter shows a new side in this film and really nails her part.
Yeah, she surprises everybody who sees the film. She was just wonderful and really had fun showing her other side, I think. She's a very smart gal, and an equally smart actor. I think we'll be seeing a lot more great work from Monica in years to come.

How is the impending strike going to affect you?
Well, I'm not going to let it, really. I'm going back to New Zealand to shoot some commercials and spend some quality time at home, and I'm also going to develop a project that takes place in New Zealand that I've been wanting to do for a long time. It's a story about a Church of England minister called Titokowaru who was a Maori, born and raised to be a man of God, but along the way, the people around him forgot that he was still Maori. When this man saw the institutionalized land theft and abuse of his people that was going on, he invented a policy of non-violent protest preceding Gandhi by 80 years, based on sit-ins, marches, that sort of thing, based on the teachings of Christ, following the New Testament. When all that failed, and nobody listened, he went back to the Old Testament and said "Okay, we'll do it this way." So they became extremely warlike and adopted all sorts of pagan Maori battle tactics, which were incredibly violent and bloody. The Maori beat the English resoundingly, and the English never truly defeated him, even in the end. He's a fascinating character. I love the idea of a man of God becoming a man of war.

The Maori cast of Tamahori's breakthrough film, Once Were Warriors (1994).

Once Were Warriors had a huge impact in New Zealand. Tell us about that.
I'm not sure how it's changed things specifically, if at all, but it did have quite an impact for about a year to eighteen month period. People always debate if films actually change things, most people say 'no,' but I always debate that. First of all, The Killing Fields changed once and for all, everyone's perceptions about what the hell was happening in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, and had such a profound effect on everybody who saw it. That's one of the prime examples of an entertaining movie that had profound social implications. The Khmer Rouge were history after that movie. When I made Once Were Warriors, we never had any intention of doing anything like that. Yet it had a very profound impact on everyone in the country because everyone saw it. There was a pirate video operation going where they churned out hundreds of bootleg copies for people in rural areas. Everybody saw this film. Maori, who usually ignore things like this in their culture: rape, incest, matricide...they don't read a lot, since they're not a culture who had a written language. If you're poor and you're rural, you have an oral history and you watch TV and go to the movies. They went to this film in unbelievable numbers, even though it was a bad rap on themselves. After the movie came out, it was discovered that there was an incremental rise of women getting out of abusive situations and seeking help, and talking about these problems. My own mother's generation, who's a white New Zelander, they might have been knocked around by their husbands, but they wouldn't talk about it. They'd never go by themselves, but in groups of two, three, and four. And it allowed them to talk about and debate these issues that were laid before them. It didn't change the nature of the society, but I said from the get-go, 'If one woman gets out of an abusive relationship because of this picture, I'll be a happy man.' And I'm sure that happened a lot.

Mulholland Falls has the feel of a truncated work that could have been great. Are we ever going to see your cut?
It's tricky. Here's the history of it: the cut that I made had 12 minutes on the front that was cut off. It explained what the whole movie was about, showing crowds in Vegas watching atom bombs go off in the desert. The problem is, I never had an explosion done. It was going to be done digitally. The problem is, the footage is almost certainly in the MGM vaults, but who owns it? Largo financed it, as a JVC subsidiary, and it no longer exists. Their rights transferred to Intermedia, who bought the Largo film library. So this would be incredibly expensive to re-cut and put onto DVD. There's no demand for it, so I'd have to pay for it all myself, I'm sure. It would most likely be very expensive and very time-consuming. If someone was willing to do so, I would be so glad to help them put it all together, but I'm not sure I want to do it myself.

There's such a great movie in there.
There is, but the problem was, stylistically the pacing was too slow and didn't have enough action for the studio people, so I had to go in there and cut it, cut it, cut it so it moved faster. In the longer version of it, there were all these far more complicated relationships that detailed what happened and why. But all I can do now is talk about it. Such is life, right? (laughs) It was a hard lesson on that one. It proved to me that no one cared about that period and that film noir genre when L.A. Confidential, which might be the most brilliant movie of its type ever made, didn't do more than $50 million at the box office until after the Academy Awards. Like the western, film noir is one of the greatest genres, but might well be a dying one.

Your three favorite filmmakers are Robert Aldrich, Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah. What's your favorite Aldrich picture?
Ulzana's Raid, which is phenomenal. Most people haven't even heard of it. Alan Sharpe wrote a great script and Aldrich made it toward the end of his career, and he was still at the peak of his powers. I can go back to almost any of his films, like Kiss Me Deadly, which is just too cool for words, and just fall in love! (laughs) The Cinematheque had an Aldrich retrospective recently. I went to it and there was Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential), Paul Verhoeven (Robocop), and all these other directors. None of us have lost our love for Aldrich.

Your favorite Peckinpah?
The Wild Bunch is my favorite film of all time. A masterpiece. Sublime on every level.

Don Siegel?
Dirty Harry is probably his best. I mean, you just can't match that for sheer ferocity. It's about as perfect an iconic American thriller as there is. But I have a great deal of affection for Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau as this bank robber who runs afoul of the mob, and again, most people don't know about it.

Any advice for first-time directors?
Look after your actors at all costs. Get yourself a really good 1st assistant director who's going to really look after you and allow you to spend time on the story and with your actors. Someone who will allow you to insulate yourself in a bubble. Not to say you don't talk to your crew or become isolationist. But it's easy on your first movie to get distracted. Stay on top of your story, with your actors, and stay focused. Get yourself a great director of photography, also, because those two people will help you make your picture. The best thing you can do with your D.P. is constantly tell him or her that you don't know what you're doing. That way they won't get resentful that they're shooting the picture, but you're getting all the credit. Just be honest, and let them know that they know more about this part of filmmaking than you do. If you have humility with everyone you work with, they'll look out for you.

Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, agent 007, in Tamahori's Die Another Day (2002).