🔗 Share this article The Director's First Film Once Were Warriors Showcased a Filmmaker of Guts and Flair During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest first films of that era, firing on all six cylinders with his gut-wrenching socially conscious melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar indigenous household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, brawling, bragging dominant welfare claimant the father, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to intimidate and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by Rena Owen, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, including his gentle daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. A son receives gang tattoos; the other is sent to a juvenile reformatory where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and gains dignity and pride. But back at Jake’s chaotic house, the daughter is assaulted by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother passionately confronts the despicable Jake: “Our people once were warriors, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, pride; soulful beings …” Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking Tamahori let rip with such intense drama, and delivered powerful blows with bar sequences, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, sincere film with a very 90s touch of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and reviewers, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed industry executives in Hollywood who could see how he could apply that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material. American Films and Diverse Work In America, the director directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops 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 a plane crash. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote amusingly about the turbulent production of shooting with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he earned again directing the second in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union. 007 Movie and Career Shifts Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of his Hollywood career was directing the 007 film Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; it was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. What is the point an invisible car, viewers asked? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to recall its parking spot. Later Work and Comeback After this, Tamahori discovered some more interesting form. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in dual parts of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or kidnapping: this was a forceful, watchable movie which sidestepped typical doppelganger tropes. And in later years, he went back to the theme of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it was his first film, the heartfelt Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.