During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar indigenous household in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their kids. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have fallen into gang life and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. A son gets tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and energy. He created a bold, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s touch of brash and trash. It was a hit with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring this energy and talent to commercial projects.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then a script by Mamet adventure drama The Bear with the actor and his co-star as characters who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he had another payday directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or perhaps the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? This car that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, the director discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of the dictator's brutal offspring the character and also his body double, used to protect the heir from attack or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
