During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of that era, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar indigenous family in Auckland's south: the actor is the boozing, fighting, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son receives tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. But back at the disordered home, Grace is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, directing them with assurance and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s touch of brash and trash. It was a hit with viewers and critics, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Diverse Work
Stateside, Tamahori made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with the actor and his co-star as characters who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer he wrote humorously about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he had another payday filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of his Hollywood career was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film mocked for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, the director discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and as well as his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a forceful, engaging film which sidestepped typical doppelganger cliches. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
