During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar indigenous family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, boasting alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse Beth, his spouse, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son receives gang tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, heartfelt film with a very 90s touch of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who could see how he could bring that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, the director directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he had another payday filming the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
But the high point, or perhaps the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember where you parked it.
Later Work and Comeback
Following this, the director found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of the dictator's brutal offspring Uday and also his body double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a punchy, watchable film which sidestepped the usual double tropes. In subsequent times, he went back to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional director – but it remained his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
