During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant debuts of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class indigenous family in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient Jake, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. A son receives tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with assurance and energy. He created a gutsy, heartfelt picture with a very 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could bring this energy and talent to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film became a cult favorite when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously 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 second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or maybe the low point, of his Hollywood career 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 – the invisible car. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, the director discovered some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and as well as his body double, employed to shield the heir from assassination or abduction: it was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he returned to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
