During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor is the boozing, brawling, boasting dominant benefit recipient the father, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a storyteller. One son receives gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the traditional weapon – and learns dignity and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with assurance and energy. He crafted a gutsy, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.
American Films and Diverse Work
In America, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as characters who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he earned again directing the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career 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 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Later Work and Return
After this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: this was a forceful, engaging film which sidestepped the usual double cliches. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
