During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, and their kids. He shows no concern to the future of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son receives gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with assurance and energy. He created a bold, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could bring this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
Stateside, Tamahori directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as two men who journey through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson 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 suspense film, and he had another payday directing the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, viewers asked? This car that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.
Later Work and Comeback
After this, the director found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and as well as Uday’s decoy double, used to protect the heir from attack or kidnapping: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical double cliches. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
