During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class indigenous family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, boasting dominant welfare claimant Jake, who returns from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son receives tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the traditions of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – 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 the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and verve. He crafted a gutsy, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could apply that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
Stateside, Tamahori 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 Alec Baldwin as two men who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film gained cult status when its producer he wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he had another payday directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of his American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car that makes it difficult to recall its parking spot.
Later Work and Comeback
Following this, the director found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to shield the heir from assassination or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging movie which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori returned to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
