In 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant debuts of that era, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. A son receives gang 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 taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is assaulted by a repulsive acquaintance “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere picture with a very 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who could see how he could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
In America, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as two men who trek through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This film gained cult status when the producer Art Linson 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 directing the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the low point, of his American work was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment mocked for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? This car which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Later Work and Return
After this, the director found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of the dictator's brutal offspring Uday and as well as Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the heir from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable film which avoided the usual double cliches. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the theme of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
