In 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant debuts of the decade, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, boasting alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, as well as his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. One son receives gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, pride; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with assurance and verve. He crafted a bold, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who could see how he could apply that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as two men who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he earned again filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.
Later Work and Comeback
After this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and as well as his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: this was a punchy, watchable movie which avoided the usual double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
