During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, brawling, boasting dominant welfare claimant the father, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and abuse Beth, his spouse, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who has talent as a storyteller. A son gets gang tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the traditions of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and pride. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, heartfelt picture with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who could see how he could apply that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Diverse Work
In America, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly 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 suspense film, and he had another payday directing the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it 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? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, the director found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: it was a forceful, watchable film which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. And in later years, he returned to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it was his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
