During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a blue-collar indigenous household in Auckland's south: the actor plays the boozing, fighting, bragging dominant welfare claimant the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gang life and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets gang tattoos; another is sent to a youth detention where he is at least tutored in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. But back at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; soulful beings …”
Emotional Violence and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with assurance and energy. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in the film industry who recognized how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
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 adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as characters who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its 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 had another payday filming the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Professional Changes
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of his American work was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film mocked for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? This car which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.
Later Work and Comeback
Following this, the director found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and as well as Uday’s decoy double, used to protect the heir from assassination or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging film which sidestepped typical double cliches. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding director – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
