In 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar Maori household in Auckland's south: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and crime, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. One son receives tattoos; the other is taken to a youth detention where he is at least educated in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and the mother forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with such emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and energy. He crafted a bold, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in the film industry who could see how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
Stateside, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops 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 wild terrain after a plane crash. (This film gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he earned again filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Professional Changes
But the high point, or maybe the low point, of his American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, the director found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and as well as his body double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical double tropes. In subsequent times, he went back to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
