During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: the actor is the drinking, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse Beth, his spouse, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gang life and crime, including his gentle daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. One son receives tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the traditional weapon – and learns dignity and self-respect. But back at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with such emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and energy. He crafted a gutsy, heartfelt picture with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who could see how he could bring that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.
American Films and Varied Projects
Stateside, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer he 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 decent suspense film, and he earned again filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment mocked for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori discovered some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and as well as Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging movie which avoided typical double tropes. And in later years, he went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
