During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a working-class indigenous family in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, fighting, boasting alpha-male welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to intimidate and abuse Beth, his spouse, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their kids. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets tattoos; another is taken to a youth detention where he is at least educated in the ways of indigenous heritage – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”
Raw Emotion and Confident Direction
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, handling them with assurance and verve. He created a bold, sincere picture with a very 90s touch of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.
Hollywood Career and Varied Projects
Stateside, the director directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the chaotic circumstances of shooting 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 second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; this was the Bond film mocked 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 where you parked it.
Subsequent Projects and Return
After this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son Uday and also his body double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging movie which sidestepped typical double tropes. In subsequent times, he went back to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an outstanding filmmaker – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.
