During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, brawling, boasting alpha-male benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and abuse Beth, his spouse, played 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 gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son receives tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns dignity and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He crafted a gutsy, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who recognized how he could bring this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
Stateside, Tamahori made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as two men who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film gained cult status when the producer he wrote amusingly 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 second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the installment mocked for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, the director discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the heir from attack or abduction: it was a punchy, watchable film which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding director – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
