During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. A son gets tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and verve. He crafted a bold, sincere film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced industry executives in the film industry who could see how he could bring this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This film became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he earned again directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Later Work and Return
After this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and as well as his body double, used to protect the heir from attack or kidnapping: this was a forceful, engaging movie which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it was his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
