During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a working-class indigenous household in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant welfare claimant Jake, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son receives gang tattoos; another is taken to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and energy. He created a bold, heartfelt film with a very 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who could see how Tamahori could apply this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
In America, Tamahori directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers 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 the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer he wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances 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 had another payday filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Professional Changes
But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of his Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film mocked for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? This car which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
Later Work and Comeback
After this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the heir from assassination or kidnapping: this was a forceful, engaging movie which sidestepped typical double tropes. In subsequent times, Tamahori returned to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
