In a 2024 interview with Screen Rant,
Lee Tamahori spoke about the depiction of Maori warfare in the film and the contrast of directing it versus his experience on
Die Another Day (2002): "...we haven't seen combat like this much on film. There's been a film called
The Dead Lands (2020), and another couple. There is now a highly trained number of Rakau experts. This is Maori hand to hand combat with edged weapon. They call them patu and taiaha. So there's weapons like most indigenous cultures had spears clubs edged weapons. So there's a lot of people trained in that now, young Maori. They're all in the film. They're a combat unit, which we put together.
Action is just something you make up in your head and you do it shot by shot by shot by shot, and work your way through it. To me it is always important, and in the difference between a James Bond action sequence and a Convert action sequence is The Convert the action has to be scarily authentic. It has to be brutal. It's fast. There's no slow motion, no trickery going on. It's just shot by shot by shot, edited down to a point. Whereas with something like most modern action films have speed ramps, and all sorts of post-production tricks on them. But I didn't want to do anything other than show the brutality of hand-to-hand combat as it was."
