🔗 Share this article

During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a working-class indigenous household in South Auckland: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, bragging dominant benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and assault his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gang life and crime, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who has talent as a writer. One son receives gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; soulful beings …”

Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori let rip with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, directing them with assurance and verve. He crafted a bold, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s touch of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed industry executives in the film industry who could see how he could bring this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.

American Films and Diverse Work

In America, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote humorously 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 earned again directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.

007 Movie and Career Shifts

But the high point, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the installment mocked for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.

Later Work and Return

After this, the director discovered some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the heir from attack or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable film which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. In subsequent times, he went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer his partner. He proved to be an exceptional director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.