During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of that era, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: the actor plays the drinking, brawling, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and assault his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter the girl, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son gets gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by a repulsive acquaintance “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, heartfelt picture with a very 90s touch of edginess. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and flair to commercial projects.
American Films and Diverse Work
In America, Tamahori 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 Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he had another payday directing the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the Bond film mocked for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
Following this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging movie which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
