In 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with the heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar indigenous household in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant benefit recipient the father, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and illegal activities, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. A son receives tattoos; another is sent to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and self-respect. But back at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
Stateside, Tamahori made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This film became a cult favorite when the producer Art Linson 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 thriller, and he had another payday directing the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Professional Changes
But the high point, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment mocked for having the worst gadget in 007 history – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and also his body double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped the usual double tropes. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
