🔗 Share this article

During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a working-class Maori family in South Auckland: the actor plays the boozing, brawling, bragging dominant benefit recipient Jake, who returns from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his older boys who have drifted into gang life and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets tattoos; another is sent to a youth detention where he is at least educated in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and the mother forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; soulful beings …”

Raw Emotion and Confident Direction

Tamahori let rip with such emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and energy. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and talent to commercial projects.

Hollywood Career and Varied Projects

In America, 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 characters who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This film became a cult favorite when the producer he wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of shooting with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he had another payday filming the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.

007 Movie and Professional Changes

But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of his Hollywood career was taking on the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall where you parked it.

Subsequent Projects and Comeback

After this, the director found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and as well as Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the heir from attack or kidnapping: this was a punchy, engaging movie which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. In subsequent times, he returned to the theme of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.