During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant welfare claimant the father, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their kids. He shows no concern to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gang life and crime, as well as his gentle daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. One son receives gang tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, pride; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such emotional violence, 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 bold, heartfelt film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could bring this energy and flair to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
Stateside, the director directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore 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 a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of filming with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he earned again filming the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
But the high point, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Later Work and Return
After this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of the dictator's brutal offspring the character and as well as his body double, employed to shield the heir from assassination or kidnapping: this was a punchy, watchable film which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. And in later years, he went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making 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 masterpiece.
