During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar indigenous family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. One son receives gang tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns dignity and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with the actor and his co-star as two men who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer he wrote humorously 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 directing the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment mocked for having the worst gadget in 007 history – the invisible car. Why would anyone need an invisible car, viewers asked? This car which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
After this, the director found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and as well as his body double, used to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or kidnapping: it was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical doppelganger cliches. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional director – but it was his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
