In 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the boozing, fighting, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and assault his wife Beth, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. A son gets gang tattoos; another is taken to a youth detention where he is at least tutored in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the traditional weapon – and gains self-worth and self-respect. But back at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed 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 bold, sincere film with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could apply this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then a script by Mamet adventure drama The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting 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 filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
But the high point, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, the director found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son the character and also his body double, employed to shield the heir from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which avoided the usual double cliches. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the theme of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
