In 1994, the director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar indigenous family in Auckland's south: the actor plays the drinking, brawling, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. One son gets tattoos; another is taken to a youth detention where he is at least educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori let rip with such emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and energy. He created a bold, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who could see how he could bring this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Diverse Work
Stateside, the director directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet adventure drama The Bear with the actor and his co-star as characters who journey through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of filming with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he earned again directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise 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 taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the installment derided for having the poorest device in 007 history – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Later Work and Comeback
After this, the director found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and as well as Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical doppelganger cliches. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the theme 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 heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
