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During 1994, this film-maker Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of that era, operating at full capacity with the heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes represent a working-class indigenous family in South Auckland: Temuera Morrison plays the drinking, fighting, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by the actress, and their kids. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have fallen into gangland culture and illegal activities, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who shows promise as a writer. A son gets gang tattoos; the other is sent to a youth detention where he is at least tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and Beth forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, they, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit …”

Raw Emotion and Confident Direction

Tamahori unleashed with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, the home scenes and the gang ritual initiation scenes, handling them with assurance and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere picture with a very 90s streak of edginess. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who could see how he could bring this energy and talent to mainstream genre material.

Hollywood Career and Diverse Work

Stateside, the director made the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who ignore protocol, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as two men who journey through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of filming with a trained bear in his droll tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a serviceable thriller, and he earned again directing the sequel in the triple-X franchise XXX State of the Union.

007 Movie and Career Shifts

Yet the peak, or perhaps the low point, of his Hollywood career was taking on the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with the star; it was the Bond film derided for having the worst gadget in the series – the invisible car. Why would anyone need such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle that makes it difficult to remember its parking spot.

Later Work and Comeback

Following this, the director found renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in dual parts of the dictator's hideous son Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from attack or abduction: it was a punchy, engaging movie which sidestepped typical double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, directing The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional director – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.