🔗 Share this article

During 1994, the film-maker Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori household in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, boasting dominant welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his weak followers to terrorise and assault his wife Beth, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son receives tattoos; another is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the ways of indigenous heritage – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and self-respect. But back at the disordered home, Grace is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”

Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with confidence and energy. He created a bold, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how he could apply that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.

American Films and Varied Projects

Stateside, Tamahori directed 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 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 turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor 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.

Bond Film and Career Shifts

But the high point, or perhaps the nadir, of his Hollywood career was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment derided for having the worst gadget in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall where you parked it.

Subsequent Projects and Comeback

After this, the director discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and also his body double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a punchy, watchable film which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, collaborating with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.