During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori made 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 working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a storyteller. One son receives gang tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip 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 crafted a gutsy, heartfelt film with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in the film industry who could see how he could bring this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of shooting with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he earned again filming the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, viewers asked? This car that makes it difficult to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, the director discovered some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the heir from assassination or abduction: it was a forceful, engaging film which avoided typical double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding director – but it remained his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
