During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar Maori household in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son receives gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and energy. He created a gutsy, sincere picture with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could apply that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as characters who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film became a cult favorite when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of filming with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he earned again 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 American work was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment mocked for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and also his body double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from attack or kidnapping: this was a forceful, watchable film which avoided typical double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the theme of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
