During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a working-class Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor plays the boozing, fighting, bragging dominant benefit recipient the father, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse Beth, his spouse, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gang life and crime, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son gets tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, pride; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, directing them with assurance and energy. He created a bold, heartfelt film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who could see how he could apply this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
Stateside, the director directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as two men who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production 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 second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's brutal offspring Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the heir from attack or abduction: this was a punchy, watchable film which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he went back to the theme of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
