Lee Tamahori travels to hell and back

Back from the wilderness: Lee Tamahori is making waves with his latest feature film, The Devil's Double. Photo / Getty Images

Director Lee Tamahori has talked about his return from the wilderness with The Devil's Double, his film about Saddam Hussein's outlandish son Uday, described by one reviewer as "a Middle-Eastern-flavoured take on Scarface".

The film has been acclaimed at Sundance Film Festival in the US this week, chiefly for English actor Dominic Cooper's dual portrayals of the sadistic Uday and Latif Yahia, the man coerced to act as his body double and who wrote a book about his experiences.

The Devil's Double has made The Hollywood Reporter's list of "10 films that will sell" at the festival, though some reviewers are divided whether, due to the vivid depictions of Uday's outlandishness, it's a guilty pleasure or a insightful portrait of a psychopath. Set to a dark thumping score, the film is full of action, violence, sex and humour.

"I just like making these types of movies," Tamahori told TimeOut. "I get my teeth into them and I hang on like a terrier and I don't let go till they're done. I quite like this type of movie but it doesn't matter what kind of film it is. I apply the same kind of logic to it all."

Predictably, Tamahori didn't want to discuss his past personal troubles - in early 2006 he was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department, when, dressed as a woman, he offered an undercover police officer oral sex.

He was subsequently convicted of criminal trespass, having pleaded no contest in exchange for other charges being dropped.

But his move back to New Zealand, followed by the independent production of The Devil's Double - it's largely Belgian-financed and was shot in Malta - wasn't because he was persona non grata in Hollywood due to the arrest. His time was up due to his studio films under-performing.

"LA was over for me before that happened in some ways, because [after the 007 movie Die Another Day] I was being slotted into a kind of studio action genre. Not only that, my last two pictures in Hollywood, Next and xXx: State of the Union, didn't work, they were flops so my use-by date in Hollywood was up.

"The other reason I moved back home was because I missed it. I was rootless in Los Angeles; it's not my home and I don't enjoy living permanently in another part of the world. I'd rather anchor myself in New Zealand and work in the rest of the world and it works out fine. I'm very happy doing that and it's what I'm doing now."

Next year he will direct the movie adaptation of Witi Ihimaera's novel, Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies, to be produced by Robin Scholes, his producer on his breakthrough feature, Once Were Warriors.) "Robin's a good producer, I haven't worked with her for a long time and I'm back doing independent films now. I want to do some films in New Zealand as well as in the rest of the world. I know Witi very well and John Collee is a good screenwriter, so it's all about that. Also it's a coming-of-age story on the East Coast, where I live now.

"So it's a story that's very close to my own heart in many ways. Not as much because it's about a Maori family, but the period in which we're going to film it, the late 50s and early 60s, which is very much when I was growing up."

While casting is a long way off, he says he will reinvent a whole new ensemble as he did with Warriors, because "there just aren't enough Maori around in acting to pull this one off. I'll go out and find people who've never acted before, and we'll create a whole new cast".

-TimeOut