The Director's Debut Once Were Warriors Revealed a Director of Courage and Style

In 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with his heartbreaking social-realist drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a blue-collar Maori family in South Auckland: the actor is the drinking, fighting, bragging dominant welfare claimant Jake, who returns from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and assault 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 crime, including his gentle daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son receives gang tattoos; the other is taken to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns dignity and pride. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were individuals with honor, dignity; people with spirit …”

Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and energy. He crafted a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who recognized how Tamahori could bring this energy and talent to commercial projects.

American Films and Varied Projects

Stateside, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who care nothing for protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin 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 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 sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.

Bond Film and Professional Changes

Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the installment derided for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall its parking spot.

Subsequent Projects and Comeback

Following this, the director discovered some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in the twin roles of the dictator's brutal offspring the character and also his body double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from attack or kidnapping: this was a punchy, engaging movie which sidestepped the usual double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional director – but it was his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.