During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the boozing, fighting, boasting dominant benefit recipient the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, 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 gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a youth detention where he is at least educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He crafted a gutsy, sincere film with a very 90s touch of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, the director directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as two men who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of filming with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he had another payday directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to shield the heir from attack or abduction: this was a punchy, watchable film which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working 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.
