In 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of the decade, operating at full capacity with his heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a working-class Maori family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, fighting, boasting alpha-male benefit recipient Jake, who returns from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son receives tattoos; the other is sent to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, pride; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, sincere film with a distinctly 90s touch of edginess. It was a hit with viewers and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could apply this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he had another payday directing the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
But the high point, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
Following this, the director found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and also his body double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable film which sidestepped typical doppelganger cliches. And in later years, he went back to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
