Lee Tamahori's First Film Once Were Warriors Revealed a Director of Courage and Style
During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori made one of the most significant first films of the decade, firing on all six cylinders with the heartbreaking socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a working-class Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their kids. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. One son gets gang tattoos; another is sent to a youth detention where he is partly tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and pride. But back at the disordered home, Grace is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”
Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking
Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with assurance and verve. He created a gutsy, heartfelt film with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who could see how he could apply that dynamism and flair to commercial projects.
American Films and Diverse Work
In America, the director directed the dark mystery 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 the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable suspense film, and he had another payday directing the second in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.
Bond Film and Career Shifts
Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.
Later Work and Return
Following this, Tamahori found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son the character and as well as Uday’s decoy double, used to shield the heir from attack or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging film which avoided the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. Tamahori was an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.
