🔗 Share this article

In 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of that era, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class indigenous household in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, brawling, bragging dominant welfare claimant the father, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors once were warriors, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”

Raw Emotion and Confident Direction

Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and verve. He crafted a bold, sincere film with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who could see how he could bring that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.

Hollywood Career and Diverse Work

In America, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as two men who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he had another payday filming the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.

007 Movie and Career Shifts

Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.

Subsequent Projects and Comeback

Following this, the director discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of the dictator's brutal offspring Uday and also his body double, employed to protect the heir from assassination or kidnapping: it was a forceful, watchable movie which avoided the usual double tropes. In subsequent times, he went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.