In 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with his heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori household in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who returns from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gang life and crime, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the traditional weapon – and gains self-worth and pride. But back at the disordered home, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, heartfelt picture with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who could see how he could apply this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
Stateside, Tamahori directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as two men who journey through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of shooting with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he earned again filming the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or perhaps the low point, of his American work was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
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 his body double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: this was a forceful, watchable film which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he went back to the theme of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
