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In 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of the decade, operating at full capacity with his heartbreaking social-realist melodrama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class indigenous family in Auckland's south: the actor is the drinking, fighting, boasting dominant benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his weak followers to intimidate and assault Beth, his spouse, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He shows no concern to the fate of his two elder sons who have drifted into gangland culture and crime, including his sensitive daughter the girl, who has talent as a storyteller. A son gets gang tattoos; the other is taken to a juvenile reformatory where he is partly tutored in the ways of Maori culture – the haka and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and pride. Meanwhile at the disordered home, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the despicable Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but in contrast to you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”

Raw Emotion and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori let rip with all this emotional violence, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, handling them with confidence and verve. He crafted a bold, heartfelt film with a distinctly 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with viewers and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed studio heads in Hollywood who could see how he could bring that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.

Hollywood Career and Varied Projects

In America, the director directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with the actor and Alec Baldwin as two men who trek through wild terrain after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer Art Linson wrote humorously about the turbulent production of shooting with an animal actor in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent thriller, and he had another payday filming the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.

Bond Film and Career Shifts

Yet the peak, or maybe the nadir, of Lee Tamahori’s Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the Bond film mocked for having the poorest device in 007 history – a cloaked vehicle. Why would anyone need an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to recall its parking spot.

Subsequent Projects and Comeback

Following this, the director discovered renewed creativity. His The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred the actor in the twin roles of Saddam Hussein’s brutal offspring the character and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: it was a punchy, watchable film which sidestepped typical double cliches. In subsequent times, Tamahori returned to the subject of Maori culture, making The Convert in 2023, working with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter his partner. He proved to be an outstanding director – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.