During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, bragging dominant welfare claimant Jake, who returns from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter the girl, who has talent as a writer. A son receives gang tattoos; the other is taken to a youth detention where he is at least educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori let rip with such emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and energy. He crafted a bold, heartfelt picture with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who could see how he could bring this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori made the noir thriller 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 Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film gained cult status when its producer he wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he had another payday filming the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or perhaps the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment mocked for having the poorest device in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
Following this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and as well as Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical double cliches. And in later years, he returned to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
