During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class Maori household in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, brawling, bragging dominant welfare claimant the father, who returns from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter the girl, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets tattoos; another is sent to a youth detention where he is at least tutored in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Diverse Work
In America, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he earned again directing the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in 007 history – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? This car that makes it difficult to recall where you parked it.
Later Work and Comeback
Following this, the director found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, used to protect the heir from attack or abduction: this was a forceful, engaging movie which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. And in later years, he returned to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
