During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of that era, operating at full capacity with the heartbreaking socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar indigenous family in Auckland's south: the actor plays the boozing, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and crime, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who has talent as a writer. One son receives tattoos; another is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and verve. He crafted a gutsy, sincere film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could apply this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Diverse Work
In America, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with the actor and his co-star as characters who trek through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he earned again directing the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or perhaps the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in 007 history – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? This car that makes it difficult to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, the director found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to shield the heir from attack or abduction: this was a punchy, engaging film which avoided typical doppelganger cliches. And in later years, he went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
