During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant debuts of the decade, operating at full capacity with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar indigenous household in Auckland's south: the actor plays the drinking, brawling, boasting dominant welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise 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, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son receives gang tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter 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 individuals with honor, dignity; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and verve. He crafted a bold, sincere film with a distinctly 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who recognized how he could bring this energy and talent to commercial projects.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori made the noir thriller 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 trek through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he had another payday filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son Uday and also his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable film which avoided the usual double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
