During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a blue-collar indigenous family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, fighting, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and assault his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter the girl, who has talent as a writer. A son gets gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, pride; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and energy. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could apply this energy and flair to commercial projects.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when its producer he wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of shooting 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 sequel 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 Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
Following this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and also his body double, employed to shield the heir from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable film which avoided the usual double cliches. And in later years, he went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
