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During 1994, the director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family represent a blue-collar Maori household in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison is the drinking, brawling, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate 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 drifted into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. A son receives gang tattoos; the other is taken to a youth detention where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the traditional weapon – and gains dignity and pride. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; tragedy ensues, and Beth forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, dignity; soulful beings …”

Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori unleashed with such emotional violence, and delivered powerful blows with the pub scenes, the home scenes and gang initiation rituals, directing them with assurance and energy. He created a bold, heartfelt film with a very 90s streak of edginess. It was a hit with audiences and reviewers, and – for good or ill – strongly influenced industry executives in the film industry who recognized how Tamahori could apply that dynamism and flair to commercial projects.

American Films and Varied Projects

In America, Tamahori made 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 his co-star as two men who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film gained cult status when its producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of filming with an animal actor in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he earned again 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 Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in the series – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.

Subsequent Projects and Return

Following this, Tamahori discovered some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s hideous son Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a forceful, watchable movie which avoided typical double tropes. And in later years, he went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. Tamahori was an outstanding filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.