🔗 Share this article

In 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of that era, operating at full capacity with his heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar Maori household in South Auckland: the actor is the drinking, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, played by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and self-respect. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, dignity; soulful beings …”

Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring this energy and talent to commercial projects.

American Films and Varied Projects

Stateside, the director directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through wild terrain after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir 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.

007 Movie and Professional Changes

But the high point, or maybe the low point, of his American work was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car that makes it difficult to remember where you parked it.

Later Work and Return

Following this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's brutal offspring the character and as well as Uday’s decoy double, used to protect the heir from assassination or abduction: this was a forceful, watchable film which avoided typical doppelganger cliches. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the theme of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.