During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar indigenous household in South Auckland: the actor is the boozing, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gang life and illegal activities, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets gang tattoos; another is sent to a youth detention where he is at least educated in the traditions of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and gains self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, directing them with assurance and energy. He created a bold, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
Stateside, Tamahori made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he earned again directing the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment derided for having the poorest device in 007 history – the invisible car. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and as well as his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: this was a punchy, watchable film which avoided typical double tropes. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding director – but it remained his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
