In 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant debuts of the decade, operating at full capacity with his gut-wrenching socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar indigenous family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, brawling, boasting dominant benefit recipient the father, who returns from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son receives gang tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least educated in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and pride. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and energy. He crafted a bold, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.
Stateside, Tamahori made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he earned again filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
But the high point, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film mocked for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
After this, the director found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of the dictator's brutal offspring Uday 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, Tamahori returned to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
