During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the gut-wrenching socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class indigenous household in Auckland's south: the actor plays the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and assault Beth, his spouse, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his older boys who have drifted into gang life and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. A son receives tattoos; another is taken to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the traditions of indigenous heritage – the haka and the traditional weapon – and gains self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth passionately confronts the wretched Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and verve. He crafted a gutsy, sincere picture with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
American Films and Varied Projects
In America, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with the actor and his co-star as characters who journey through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote humorously 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 earned again filming the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.
007 Movie and Career Shifts
But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? This car which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Comeback
Following this, the director found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son Uday and as well as his body double, employed to protect the heir from assassination or abduction: it was a forceful, watchable film which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. In subsequent times, he went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer his partner. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
