🔗 Share this article

During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of that era, operating at full capacity with his gut-wrenching socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. A son receives tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the traditions of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, they were individuals with honor, 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 assurance and energy. He created a gutsy, heartfelt picture with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.

Hollywood Career and Varied Projects

Stateside, the director directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he earned again directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.

Bond Film and Professional Changes

Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment 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 which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.

Subsequent Projects and Return

Following this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the heir from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical double cliches. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.