During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the boozing, brawling, bragging dominant welfare claimant the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son gets tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with assurance and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced industry executives in the film industry who recognized how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
Stateside, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when its 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 serviceable thriller, and he earned again directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and also his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or kidnapping: this was a forceful, watchable film which avoided typical double tropes. And in later years, he returned to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
