During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, operating at full capacity 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, fighting, bragging dominant welfare claimant the father, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their kids. 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 writer. A son receives gang tattoos; the other is taken to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could apply this energy and flair to commercial projects.
American Films and Diverse Work
Stateside, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as two men who journey through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he had another payday directing the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the low point, of his American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, the director discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son the character and also his body double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: it was a forceful, engaging film which sidestepped the usual double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
