🔗 Share this article

During 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 melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a working-class indigenous household in Auckland's south: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. A son gets tattoos; the other is taken to a youth detention where he is partly tutored in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”

Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori unleashed with such emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and verve. He crafted a bold, sincere film with a very 90s touch of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced industry executives in Hollywood who could see how he could apply that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.

Hollywood Career and Varied Projects

Stateside, Tamahori 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 the actor and Alec Baldwin as two men who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of shooting with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book 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.

Bond Film and Career Shifts

But the high point, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in 007 history – the invisible car. Why would anyone need an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.

Subsequent Projects and Return

After this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and as well as his body double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or kidnapping: it was a punchy, engaging movie which avoided typical double cliches. In subsequent times, Tamahori went back to the theme of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer his partner. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.