🔗 Share this article

In 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a working-class indigenous household in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, brawling, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who returns from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter the girl, who has talent as a writer. A son gets gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns 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 passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”

Emotional Violence and Confident Direction

Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and verve. He crafted a gutsy, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.

Hollywood Career and Varied Projects

Stateside, Tamahori made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore procedure, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film gained cult status when the producer he wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of shooting with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he had another payday filming the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.

007 Movie and Professional Changes

Yet the peak, or maybe the low point, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment mocked for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? This car which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.

Later Work and Return

After this, Tamahori found some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the heir from attack or abduction: it was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he went back to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.