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During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori made one of the biggest first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with his heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar Maori household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, boasting alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, played by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gang life and crime, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a writer. A son gets tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains self-worth and pride. But back at the disordered home, Grace is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were individuals with honor, pride; people with spirit …”

Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori unleashed with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and energy. He created a gutsy, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced studio heads in Hollywood who could see how Tamahori could bring that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.

Hollywood Career and Varied Projects

In America, Tamahori directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who journey through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the 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 earned again filming the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.

007 Movie and Career Shifts

Yet the peak, or perhaps the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in 007 history – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.

Later Work and Return

Following this, Tamahori discovered some more interesting form. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and as well as his body double, used to shield the heir from attack or abduction: this was a punchy, watchable movie which sidestepped the usual doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he went back to the subject of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his debut, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.