The Director's First Film Once Were Warriors Showcased a Filmmaker of Guts and Flair

During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor plays the boozing, brawling, boasting dominant welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their kids. He shows no concern to the future of his older boys who have fallen into gang life and crime, as well as his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son receives tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and self-respect. But back at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”

Raw Emotion and Confident Direction

Tamahori let rip with such emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s touch of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and flair to commercial projects.

Hollywood Career and Diverse Work

In America, Tamahori made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with the actor and his co-star as two men who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the 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 suspense film, and he had another payday filming the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.

007 Movie and Career Shifts

Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of his American work was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall its parking spot.

Later Work and Comeback

After this, the director discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of the dictator's brutal offspring the character and also his body double, used to shield the young tyrant-princeling from attack or kidnapping: this was a punchy, engaging film which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.