During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor is the boozing, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gang life and crime, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. But back at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He crafted a bold, sincere film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who could see how he could bring this energy and flair to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore procedure, and then a script by Mamet 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 the 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 thriller, and he earned again directing the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work 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? This car which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, the director found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and as well as his body double, employed to shield the heir from attack or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
