In 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant debuts of the decade, operating at full capacity with the heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, bragging dominant welfare claimant the father, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and crime, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. One son gets tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori let rip with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, heartfelt picture with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who could see how he could bring this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Diverse Work
In America, the director directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as two men who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of filming with a trained bear 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 XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in 007 history – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and as well as his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: this was a forceful, engaging movie which sidestepped the usual double tropes. In subsequent times, he returned to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional director – but it was his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
