In 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and crime, including his gentle daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. One son receives tattoos; the other is sent to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the traditions of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and pride. But back at the disordered home, the daughter is assaulted by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with such emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and energy. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could apply this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
Stateside, Tamahori made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of shooting with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he earned again directing the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of his American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in 007 history – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
Following this, the director discovered some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the heir from assassination or abduction: it was a forceful, watchable film which avoided the usual double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
