During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a working-class indigenous family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the boozing, brawling, boasting dominant welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. A son gets gang tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the traditional weapon – and gains dignity and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with such emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and energy. He crafted a bold, sincere film with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who could see how Tamahori could apply this energy and flair to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers 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 film gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of shooting with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he had another payday filming the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of his American work was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? This car which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, the director discovered some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and as well as his body double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging film which avoided the usual double tropes. And in later years, he returned to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer his partner. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
