The JBIFC is very sad to report that the Kiwi film director Lee Tamahori, who gave us Die Another Day (2002), Pierce Brosnan’s fourth and final James Bond movie, has passed away. He died on November 7th, 2025, after a brave battle with Parkinson’s disease.
Warren Lee Tamahori (17 June 1950 – 7 November 2025) was a New Zealand film director. His feature directorial debut, the hard-hitting independent film Once Were Warriors (1994), was a highly-praised critical and commercial success, and won rave reviews from film experts.
Over the next few years, Tamahori directed a variety of works both in his native country and in the USA, including the survival drama The Edge (1997), the Alex Cross thriller Along Came a Spider (2001), and, of course, the smash-hit 007 movie Die Another Day (2002). Tamahori won the New Zealand Film Award for Best Director for Once Were Warriors, and there is persuasive evidence that the movie was a big influence on the decision of Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, the EON co-producers, to choose Tamahori for DAD.
Although the main studio had some reservations about the ‘wildcard’ choice of Tamahori as director, and the director himself was aware of MGM’s doubts, he was determined to prove them wrong, and presented the main studio with plenty of ideas about what he would do with the James Bond character.
Armed with a script by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who envisaged DAD as a You Only Live Twice-style epic but with grittier storyline, with a Hugo Drax type of villain drawn straight from Ian Fleming, Tamahori set about putting his vision into action. The director was also keen to pay tribute to the previous James Bond movies, and said at one point: ‘I’ve been seeding all these little homages to past Bond movies without overpowering this one. Those who love Bond movies will see them all, there’s probably going to be about fifteen to twenty of them all the way through the movie…’.
The film premiered on 18th November, 2002, at the Royal Albert Hall in central London, and went on to make a superb worldwide gross of $431,942,139.
Lee Tamahori, 1950-2025. RIP.
