During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with the heartbreaking socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: the actor is the drinking, brawling, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient Jake, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. A son receives tattoos; another is taken to a youth detention where he is at least educated in the ways 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 “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced industry executives in the film industry who recognized how he could apply this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as two men who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of shooting with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he earned again directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment derided for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Later Work and Return
Following this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and as well as Uday’s decoy double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: it was a forceful, engaging movie which sidestepped typical double tropes. And in later years, he went back to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
