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During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the most significant first films of the decade, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. This family are a working-class Maori family in Auckland's south: the actor is the drinking, brawling, boasting dominant welfare claimant Jake, who comes home from pub visits with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and assault Beth, his spouse, played by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the fate of his older boys who have fallen into gangland culture and crime, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who has talent as a writer. A son gets tattoos; the other is sent to a youth detention where he is partly educated in the ways of Maori culture – the war dance and the traditional weapon – and learns self-worth and pride. But back at the disordered home, the daughter is raped by a repulsive acquaintance “Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our ancestors used to be fighters, but unlike you, they, they were people with mana, pride; soulful beings …”

Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with the pub scenes, domestic moments and gang initiation rituals, directing them with assurance and verve. He created a gutsy, sincere film with a distinctly 90s touch of edginess. It was a hit with viewers and reviewers, and – for good or ill – deeply impressed studio heads in the film industry who could see how he could apply that dynamism and talent to mainstream genre material.

American Films and Varied Projects

Stateside, the director made the dark mystery Mulholland Falls, about violent LAPD cops who ignore protocol, and then the David Mamet-scripted adventure drama The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and his co-star as two men who trek through the wilderness after a plane crash. (This film became a cult favorite 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 serviceable suspense film, and he had another payday filming the sequel 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; this was the Bond film derided for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point such a car, audiences wondered? It was a vehicle which makes it very hard to remember its parking spot.

Subsequent Projects and Return

Following this, the director discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 starred Dominic Cooper in the twin roles of the dictator's hideous son Uday and also his body double, employed to shield the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: this was a punchy, watchable film which sidestepped typical double tropes. And in later years, Tamahori went back to the subject of indigenous traditions, making The Convert in 2023, working with writer Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his greatest work.