During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar indigenous family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and abuse Beth, his spouse, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his gentle daughter the girl, who has talent as a writer. One son receives gang tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and gains self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, 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 the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and energy. He created a gutsy, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could apply this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
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 adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as two men who journey through the wilderness 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 earned again directing the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or perhaps the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and also Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a punchy, engaging movie which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. In subsequent times, he returned to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
