During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: the actor is the boozing, fighting, bragging dominant benefit recipient Jake, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gang life and illegal activities, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. But back at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and energy. He crafted a gutsy, heartfelt picture with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who could see how he could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film became a cult favorite when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he earned again filming the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or perhaps the low point, of his American work was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment derided for having the poorest device in 007 history – 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 Comeback
After this, the director found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son Uday and as well as Uday’s decoy double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: it was a forceful, watchable film which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
