Lee Tamahori, who directed “Once Were Warriors,” a riveting drama about the breakdown of an urban Maori family that became the highest-grossing film in New Zealand’s history, died on Nov. 7. He was 75.
His family announced the death in a statement, which did not specify where he died. Mr. Tamahori had discussed having Parkinson’s disease in an interview this past spring on a Maori-focused current affairs television show.
Mr. Tamahori directed several big-budget Hollywood movies, including “Mulholland Falls” (1996), a noirish crime movie with Nick Nolte and Jennifer Connelly; “The Edge” (1997), a thriller with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin; “Die Another Day” (2002), a James Bond movie starring Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry; and “Next” (2007), a sci-fi action movie with Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore.
But “Once Were Warriors” (1994) was the film that made his reputation, and it seems by far the likeliest one to retain a following.
In 2014, a poll of experts in New Zealand about the nation’s best film ranked “Once Were Warriors” No. 1. After its release, it remained New Zealand’s top box-office hit for years.
In a review, Janet Maslin of The New York Times called the movie “a brutally effective family drama” with a cast that was “frighteningly credible” and expressed “a powerful sense of longing.”
Mr. Tamahori was part Maori, and the film’s actors and writers were all also part of the Indigenous tribe.
The movie begins, memorably, with an idyllic scene of virginal nature — until the camera pans and reveals that the view is of a highway billboard. In a segregated world of Maori city dwellers, we see timeless activities performed in a corrupted but alluring modern milieu. There are drunken singalongs of folk tunes, teenagers recounting epic tales in a burned-out car, and fights that test male honor in a rowdy pub.
The film’s focus is on Beth Heke (Rena Owen) and her husband of 18 years, Jake “the Mus” Heke (Temuera Morrison). Jake is the toughest guy in a tough world. In a horrifying scene, he beats Beth’s face into a puffy, bruised mess. Yet they also look at each other longingly while singing a duet among friends and, in private, feel a powerful sexual connection. The result is domestic chaos that scares and alienates their five children.
Only one of them, Grace (Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell), an aspiring writer, has grown to early maturity, at 13, without any loss of innocence. That delicacy, its lack of protection, becomes the basis for the dramatic climax of the film.
Its scenes of violence — which include, at one point, rape — prompted the film critic Kenneth Turan to write in The Los Angeles Times, “Getting beaten up by a movie is not a sensation everyone cherishes.” But Stuff, a New Zealand media group, credited Mr. Tamahori with having “laid this country’s underbelly bare.”
The film was based on a novel of the same title by Alan Duff, a writer of Maori ancestry. The book focuses on Jake. Mr. Tamahori often described his decision to shift the emphasis to Beth and the children, which required him, as the project was being developed, to replace Mr. Duff with a female Maori writer, the playwright Riwia Brown.
“Even though he’d written the book, he wasn’t the right person to write the screenplay,” Mr. Tamahori told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. “Men tend to write tough-guy dialogue, the stuff they’d like to hear themselves say, and I wanted a woman to throw that stuff back at us.”
The newspaper concluded, “Sometimes directors make the best editors.”
Warren Lee Tamahori was born on April 22, 1950, in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital. His father, Piripi, was a Maori social worker often involved in settling the kind of violent disputes depicted in “Once Were Warriors.” His mother, Patricia, was British.
In the television interview this year, he recalled having to bring himself up and doing so largely at the movies, where he learned more, he said, about “moral codes,” other cultures and his own “hormonal ragings” than he did at home.
Mr. Tamahori spent years working as a commercial artist, a photographer, a crew member on film sets and a director of television commercials.
The announcement of his death listed his romantic companion as Justine and his children as Sam, Max, Meka and Tané. Complete information on survivors was not available.
In the mid-2000s, now a famous director in Hollywood, Mr. Tamahori found himself in the news for entering the car of an undercover police officer while dressed in drag and offering to perform a sex act for money. Criminal charges were dismissed in a plea deal, and the incident did not seem to affect Mr. Tamahori’s career. He exhibited sang-froid, brushing it off in interviews in later years.
Some of his later films were well reviewed, but Ms. Maslin lamented in 1997, “Lee Tamahori, who made the small, much-admired ‘Once Were Warriors,’ typically moved on to bigger, if not better, pastures.”
His most recent film, “The Convert,” which also concerned Maori themes, came out last year. In a New York Times review, Ben Kenigsberg praised it for avoiding clichés.
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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