During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor is the boozing, brawling, bragging dominant benefit recipient Jake, who returns from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. A son gets tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, pride; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori let rip with such intense drama, 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, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s touch of edginess. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
Stateside, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor 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.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
Following this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son Uday and as well as Uday’s decoy double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: this was a forceful, engaging movie which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it was his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
