During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, operating at full capacity with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have fallen into gang life and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and energy. He crafted a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in the film industry who could see how he could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This film became a cult favorite when its producer he wrote humorously about the turbulent production of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he had another payday filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
But the high point, or perhaps the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
Later Work and Comeback
After this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son the character and as well as his body double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: it was a forceful, engaging movie which avoided the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
