Actor Lucy Lawless takes the director's chair for the first time in her new documentary, Never Look Away, on the life of fearless NZ-born photojournalist Margaret Moth. Photo / Matt Klitscher
She plays a retired detective in the TV show My Life is Murder, but actor-turned-director Lucy Lawless tells Joanna Wane how she became a real-life amateur sleuth for her new documentary on legendary Kiwi photojournalist Margaret Moth
Lucy Lawless remembers being riveted to the television when news broke that “one of our own” had been shot in Sarajevo.
Gisborne-born war correspondent Margaret Moth had already become the stuff of legend at CNN as a fearless photojournalist who danced with death – striding purposefully towards danger while everyone else ducked for cover or ran for their lives.
In 1992, Sarajevo was under siege and civilians in the Bosnian capital were being deliberately targeted by Serbian forces. Travelling along a notorious stretch of road known as Sniper Alley, Moth was hit by a bullet that shattered the lower half of her face.
Her injuries were so catastrophic, she wasn’t expected to survive. Some thought it might be kinder if she didn’t.
Two years and a dozen reconstructive surgeries later, she’d worked her way back to the frontline, joking that she made the return trip to Sarajevo to find what was left of her teeth.
CNN colleague and close friend Joe Duran gave up his job as a cameraman to become Moth’s sound technician after she was shot, acting as a translator because her speech was badly slurred.
When Moth died of colon cancer in 2010, she bequeathed him half of her estate and the 25 stray cats she looked after at her house in Istanbul. She was 59.
“I would have liked to think I’d have gone out with a bit more flair,” she said, in a final interview a few months before her death.
In the United States, Lawless still holds a legendary status of her own after starring in the cult 90s fantasy series Xena: Warrior Princess. But she had no directing experience and had never met Duran before he contacted her out of the blue asking if she wanted to make a film about Moth.
“I was in the kitchen one morning checking my emails when this thing popped up and I was cast straight back to that electric moment when I heard Margaret Moth had been shot, which was burned in my brain,” she says.
“I said ‘yes’ immediately because I was terrified the email had been sent to me by mistake and that somebody else would grab it and they wouldn’t do it right.
“I don’t know what made me think that I should be the one to tell her story, but it wasn’t a conscious choice – it’s almost like the story chose me. And I’m so glad that I had the lack of common sense to roll with it.”
Never Look Away premiered in the World Documentary Competition at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in January. Directed by Lawless, who also has a writer and producer credit, it’s sitting on a 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating ahead of its featured slot at the New Zealand International Film Festival, which opens on July 31.
Midway through her fourth season as ex-homicide cop Alexa Crowe in My Life is Murder, the Auckland-based actor has never been much interested in playing a damsel in distress, on or off-screen.
Known for her environmental activism, she was arrested in 2013 after spending 77 hours up a ship tower as part of a Greenpeace protest against Shell’s oil exploration in the Arctic.
So it’s no surprise she’s chosen to interrogate the life of such a dynamic, complex woman for her directorial debut.
Nor does it hurt that the optics are a publicist’s dream.
“Warrior princess on TV. Warrior princess in real life”, she says, with a laugh when I ask if the comparison makes her cringe.
“LL. MM. Are you kidding? I know what a headline looks like. I’ll use that for everything it’s worth.”
Lawless is in London pursuing her next three projects when we talk via Zoom. Stricken with Covid, she’s red-nosed and racked by coughing fits but gamely battles through. Turning her focus to directing has been a steep learning curve, she admits, “but it’s all storytelling, right? And I’ve been doing that a long time”.
It was her husband Rob Tapert, the American producer she met on the set of Xena, who Joe Duran approached first. Tapert turned him down but suggested his wife might be interested instead. Maybe he thought it was a long shot because he never got around to mentioning that to her.
A charismatic, exotic-looking figure with spiky black hair and Joan Jett eyeliner, Moth was the first news camerawoman in Australasia, working for TVNZ before moving to the US in the 80s.
One of her first international jobs was covering the riots in India that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
In the years that followed, she ticked off most of the world’s most violent conflict zones: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Lebanon, Georgia, Zaire.
During Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, she smoked cigars in the evening with US General Norman Schwarzkopf.
In 2002, she hid herself within a group of protesting Palestinian doctors in the West Bank and walked straight past Israeli troops to secure an interview with Yasser Arafat. At night, she wore her boots and combat trousers to bed.
Damaged by a dysfunctional childhood, Moth took a case to court for the right to have her tubes tied in her 20s because she was determined never to have children of her own.
An “unmitigated hedonist”, she fed her hunger for sensation with sex, drugs and adrenalin, says Lawless, whose soundtrack to the documentary opens with the song Barracuda and closes with Dunedin rock band The Clean.
Even now, Lawless isn’t quite sure what to make of her.
“Some people are going to think she’s an inspirational heroine. Some people are going to think she’s an egregious slapper. Margaret always wanted to know what was over the edge of the abyss – and war was the greatest, dirtiest, most interesting abyss of all.”
The intense two-and-a-half years Lawless spent making the documentary involved some impressive detective work.
Poring through news clips on YouTube, she spotted Moth in the background of video footage shot by a young Iranian.
When he didn’t respond to her messages asking for permission to re-purpose the sequence, she found a Farsi speaker through the Citizens Advice Bureau in Auckland and paid her to track him down.
CNN had released a tribute to Moth after her death and Lawless says she was never interested in producing another puff piece.
Going “subterranean” meant digging more deeply into a darker origin story and what made her tick.
The past wasn’t just another country for Moth but a Voldemortian black hole.
A natural blonde, she changed her name from Margaret Wilson to Margaret Gipsy Moth, after the plane that first fuelled her passion for skydiving. Ruthlessly reinventing herself, she never looked back, skipping town as soon as she could.
“There are things about her that nobody knows because she was so compartmentalised,” says Lawless.
“She claimed she couldn’t remember anything about her past and everybody bought it.
“The key to her relationships was that they did not transgress her boundaries, and Margaret’s boundaries were up high.”
Probing behind that carefully crafted public persona, Never Look Away features remarkably open interviews with Moth’s three siblings and two former lovers who became emotional anchors in her life.
By all accounts, her father turned violent when he was drunk, but Lawless says she came to realise the hatred Moth openly expressed for him was a red herring.
“It took me a long time to realise that her mother was the real problem, because perversely she kept her very close. This lovely little old lady with curly grey hair looked like a granny from Central Casting, but she had a rage that would turn her eyes black.
“I couldn’t go too deeply into the family history, which I slightly regret, because the film’s not about them and I couldn’t truly excavate that [on camera] because they have no capacity for self-pity. They’re wonderful human beings, but there’s something about the neglect of the spirit of those children that caused this very fragmented family and just strangled something in all of them.
“Growing up in an environment like that where women were only made to breed babies would have been death to Margaret. Everything she did was to not turn out like her mother. “But I think really she was much more like her mother than anybody could have guessed.”
Bullying and the misuse of (typically male) authority made Moth ferocious.
Vain and self-absorbed, she could also be careless with people.
Jeff Russi, a lost soul who bookends the documentary, was a 17-year-old Texan schoolboy when Moth took him as a lover. She was 30.
Lawless developed a close connection with Russi and was the last person to talk with him before he died last December, never having seen the film.
After spending years in an open relationship with Moth, he’d struggled to cope with her disfiguring injuries and felt guilty for abandoning her.
“Margaret was one of the things he lost in the fire of his own addiction. You get to see him from his hopeful, brilliant youth to his desolate, brilliant older age, and with all the love and regret and recrimination and joy in between.”
Lawless says polite society became no place for Moth, who dribbled constantly despite all the facial reconstructions that gave her some semblance of normality.
The lifesaving blood transfusion she’d been given after she was shot had also infected her with hepatitis and in those days, the treatment was painful and protracted.
“She spent a lot of time living in Ramallah [on the West Bank] and nobody questioned what happened to her there because they all have uncles and aunties with bullet holes in them.
“That’s the disgusting truth of war.”
Moth wasn’t alone in feeling more at home on the frontline. One of her CNN colleagues interviewed in the documentary says she used her camera as a spotlight on people behaving badly and that gave her life purpose.
The way Lawless sees it, war correspondents become trauma-bonded to the job, and the heightened sense of danger mirrored the frenetic vibrations of Moth’s inner life.
“That’s why they want to get back when a conflict kicks off. They’re on red alert because their friends are over there, and they believe in the validity and the importance of their jobs because if the conflict doesn’t get covered, the aggressors can say it never happened.
“Margaret didn’t have a death wish, she had a life wish. She was doing something that she felt was worthwhile – telling the story of the non-combatants, the victims of war. And that’s where she found her children. After a life of hedonism, those are the kids she served in the end.”
* The New Zealand International Film Festival is on from July 31 to September 4. The full programme will be released on Monday.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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