During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar indigenous household in South Auckland: the actor plays the boozing, brawling, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits 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, including his gentle daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. A son receives gang tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with assurance and energy. He created a bold, heartfelt film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could bring this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
In America, Tamahori directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as two men who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir 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.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the low point, of his Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the Bond film mocked for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, the director found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical double cliches. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
