During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant debuts of that era, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori household in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and pride. But back at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with such intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, handling them with assurance and verve. He crafted a bold, heartfelt picture with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in the film industry who could see how he could bring that dynamism and flair to commercial projects.
American Films and Diverse Work
In America, the director directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with the actor and his co-star as two men who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly 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 filming 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 directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment derided for having the poorest device in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and as well as Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a punchy, watchable film which avoided the usual double cliches. And in later years, he returned to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional director – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
