During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who returns from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, as well as his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; another is taken to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the haka and the traditional weapon – and gains self-worth and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, directing them with assurance and energy. He crafted a gutsy, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who recognized how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
Stateside, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as two men who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer he wrote humorously about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he earned again filming the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the low point, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Later Work and Return
Following this, the director found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son the character and also his body double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable movie which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. In subsequent times, he went back to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
