Lee Tamahori's First Film Once Were Warriors Showcased a Filmmaker of Guts and Flair
During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with his heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar indigenous household in South Auckland: the actor plays the boozing, fighting, boasting dominant benefit recipient Jake, who returns from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their kids. He shows no concern to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets tattoos; another is taken to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and pride. But back at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by a repulsive acquaintance “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and verve. He crafted a bold, sincere picture with a very 90s touch of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could bring this energy and flair to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, Tamahori made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then a script by Mamet adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie became a cult favorite when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of shooting with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he had another payday filming the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the low point, of his Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, Tamahori discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son the character and as well as Uday’s decoy double, employed to shield the heir from attack or kidnapping: this was a punchy, watchable film which avoided the usual double cliches. And in later years, he went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
