During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of that era, operating at full capacity with the heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a blue-collar Maori household in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant benefit recipient the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and assault Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who has talent as a storyteller. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and energy. He created a bold, heartfelt film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in the film industry who recognized how Tamahori could apply this energy and talent to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Diverse Work
In America, Tamahori made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer he 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 suspense film, and he earned again filming the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
But the high point, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film mocked for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and also his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: this was a forceful, engaging movie which sidestepped typical double tropes. And in later years, he went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
