During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of that era, operating at full capacity with the heartbreaking socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor is the boozing, brawling, bragging dominant welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. One son gets tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns dignity and pride. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, directing them with assurance and verve. He crafted a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring this energy and talent to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori directed 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 his co-star as characters who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he had another payday directing the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of his American work was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film mocked for having the worst gadget in 007 history – the invisible car. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car that makes it difficult to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and as well as his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a punchy, watchable film which avoided the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer his partner. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it was his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
