During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor plays the boozing, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, as well as his gentle daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. A son gets tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and pride. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, pride; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with assurance and verve. He created a gutsy, heartfelt picture with a very 90s touch of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori directed the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as characters who journey through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This film gained cult status when its producer he wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he had another payday filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or maybe the nadir, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the installment derided for having the poorest device in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? This car which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and as well as his body double, used to shield the heir from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he went back to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional director – but it was his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
