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During 1994, this director Lee Tamahori delivered one of the biggest debuts of the decade, operating at full capacity with the gut-wrenching socially conscious drama Once Were Warriors. The Mekes are a blue-collar indigenous household in Auckland's south: Temuera Morrison is the boozing, brawling, bragging alpha-male benefit recipient Jake, who comes home from drinking in the pub with his pathetic sycophant mates to terrorise and abuse his wife Beth, portrayed by the actress, and their five children. He is entirely indifferent to the future of his two elder sons who have fallen into gang life and illegal activities, as well as his gentle daughter Grace, who shows promise as a storyteller. One son gets gang tattoos; the other is sent to a youth detention where he is partly tutored in the traditions of Maori culture – the war dance and the taiaha warrior spear – and learns self-worth and self-respect. Meanwhile at Jake’s chaotic house, Grace is raped by Jake’s grotesque friend “Uncle Bully”; disaster follows, and the mother forcefully challenges the wretched Jake: “Our people used to be fighters, but unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, dignity; people with spirit …”

Emotional Violence and Skilled Filmmaking

Tamahori let rip with all this intense drama, and landed sledgehammer punches with bar sequences, domestic moments and the gang ritual initiation scenes, directing them with confidence and verve. He created a bold, sincere picture with a very 90s streak of brash and trash. It succeeded with audiences and critics, and – whether positive or negative – deeply impressed industry executives in the film industry who recognized how he could bring that dynamism and flair to mainstream genre material.

Hollywood Career and Varied Projects

Stateside, the director directed the noir thriller Mulholland Falls, about aggressive police officers who care nothing for procedure, and then a script by Mamet survival thriller The Bear with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as characters who trek through the wilderness after their plane crashes. (This moderate movie gained cult status when the producer he wrote humorously about the chaotic circumstances of filming with a trained bear in his witty Hollywood book What Just Happened?) Along Came a Spider was a decent suspense film, and he had another payday filming the sequel in the XXX series XXX State of the Union.

Bond Film and Career Shifts

But the high point, or maybe the low point, of his Hollywood career was directing the Bond movie Die Another Day in 2002, with Pierce Brosnan; this was the installment mocked for having the poorest device in the series – the invisible car. What is the point an invisible car, audiences wondered? This car which makes it very hard to remember where you parked it.

Later Work and Return

Following this, the director discovered renewed creativity. The The Devil’s Double in 2011 featured the actor in the twin roles of the dictator's brutal offspring Uday and also Uday’s decoy double, employed to protect the young tyrant-princeling from assassination or abduction: it was a punchy, watchable movie which avoided the usual doppelganger cliches. And in later years, he went back to the theme of Maori culture, directing The Convert in 2023, collaborating with Australian critic-turned-screenwriter Shane Danielsen. He proved to be an exceptional filmmaker – but it remained his first film, the emotional Once Were Warriors, that was his masterpiece.