During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant benefit recipient the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gang life and crime, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son gets tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and self-respect. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence 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, handling them with assurance and energy. He crafted a bold, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s touch of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and flair to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
In America, Tamahori directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as two men who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of filming 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 filming the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or perhaps 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 installment mocked for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Later Work and Return
Following this, Tamahori discovered some more interesting form. His 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, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he returned to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
