In 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor plays the drinking, brawling, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who has talent as a storyteller. A son receives tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and the mother passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; soulful beings …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with assurance and energy. He created a gutsy, heartfelt film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who could see how he could apply this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
Stateside, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as two men who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir 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.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s American work was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember where you parked it.
Later Work and Comeback
After this, the director discovered renewed creativity. His 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, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: this was a forceful, engaging movie which avoided typical double cliches. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
