In 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a working-class indigenous household in Auckland's south: the actor plays the boozing, brawling, bragging dominant welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, sincere film with a distinctly 90s touch of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in the film industry who could see how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer he wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he earned again filming the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment mocked for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.
Later Work and Return
After this, the director found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a punchy, engaging movie which sidestepped the usual double tropes. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
