During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and crime, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. A son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a youth detention where he is partly tutored in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and the mother passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori let rip with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and energy. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who recognized how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
In America, the director directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as two men who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film became a cult favorite when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously 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 thriller, and he had another payday filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember where you parked it.
Later Work and Return
Following this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and also his body double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: this was a punchy, engaging movie which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. In subsequent times, he returned to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding director – but it was his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
