In 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, operating at full capacity with his heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, fighting, bragging dominant benefit recipient the father, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gang life and crime, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and energy. He created a bold, heartfelt picture with a very 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
Stateside, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he earned again filming the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.
Later Work and Return
Following this, the director discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in the twin roles of the dictator'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 forceful, engaging movie which sidestepped the usual double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
