Lucy Lawless.Supplied
Kick-ass Kiwi woman recognizes kick-ass Kiwi woman. That’s the simple explanation for why Lucy Lawless – the New Zealand-born star of television’s Xena: Warrior Princess – felt “an electric shock” run through her when she received an unsolicited e-mail asking her to make a documentary about CNN cameraperson Margaret Moth. But there’s also a deeper reason.
Reading the e-mail from Joe Duran (also a CNN cameraperson), Lawless’s mind instantly reeled back to 1992. “All of New Zealand was riveted to CNN because Margaret, one of our people, had been shot while filming the siege of Sarajevo,” she said during an interview in Toronto last spring. “Immediately, I was making rash promises that I would find producers and funding, because this film” – Never Look Away, out now – “had to be made. To this day I can’t tell you why I was so certain. But when an idea gets its hooks in me, I’m like a dirt sparrow, I want to get down and roll around in it. I want to get covered in it.”
Moth, who died of cancer in 2010 at 59, is certainly a fascinating subject. The first camerawoman for Television New Zealand, she went on to chase hurricanes in Texas and smoke cigars with U.S. General Norman Schwarzkopf while covering Desert Storm in Kuwait. When Scud missiles were raining on Saudi Arabia in 1991, she ran up to her hotel’s roof terrace to film them. Later that year, she covered Georgia’s civil war; her colleagues crouched down as snipers shot into the crowd, but Moth stood up and got the footage.
The documentary Never Look Away, about cameraperson Margaret Moth, is out now.Supplied
The sniper bullet in Sarajevo blew off half her jaw. But 25 surgeries later, she was back at work in Rwanda, Bosnia, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and the West Bank – where she was shot again, in the foot. In war zones, she could go days without food and slept in her combat boots. The formidable Christiane Amanpour acknowledges in Never Look Away that Moth intimidated her. “War is people,” Moth says in the film, so she had to bear witness.
“I like the shadow side of humanity, the chiaroscuro in all of us,” Lawless says. “I’m not interested in an airbrushed mannequin. That is not attractive. I want the messy business of being a human being, the slipperiness of identity, the fluidity of relationships,” she says. “That’s where the good stuff is for me.”
Moth had that good stuff. Her mottoes were “No regrets” and “Don’t be boring.” She favoured punky black clothes, wild black hair, thick black eyeliner ringing her blue eyes. She smoked a pipe, dropped acid, skydived, and had open relationships with many lovers, including one who was 17 when she was 30. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother ice cold to her and her four siblings, which may explain the harrowing paintings she made of children cowering in corners.
“Margaret was this bundle of contradictions, so polarized within herself,” Lawless says. “The more I learned about her, the more the film became a hunt for the woman. What was the core of her? I would say it was a void of love. The emotional neglect, the dearth of comfort. Her pitiless childhood was the superpower that drove her.”
Was it also her downfall?, I ask. “What do you mean?” Lawless says.
Moth was brave, but was she also reckless? “She would fight that idea very much,” Lawless says. “In her mind, everything was calculated.”
Sprinting to a rooftop during a bombing? Standing up in a crowd during gunfire? “I see that as an existential challenge,” Lawless replies. “Facing down death – I do relate to this. I’ve been on Greenpeace missions in the Arctic and in New Zealand. In New Zealand I was stuck in an oil drilling ship’s crow’s nest for almost four days, on this gnarly metal surface, spiky like a bike pedal. There are times you feel you could die, but because your actions are in line with your purest beliefs, you feel this peacefulness.”
Lawless, 56, is blond now, but she spent a fair chunk of her life with wild black hair and eyeliner ringing her blue eyes. She’s wearing an outfit Moth would have admired: black pants, sneakers, T-shirt, vest, a striking jade necklace and very cool, oversized gold aviator glasses. Moth’s story hooked Lawless so thoroughly because she recognized herself in it – while also recognizing that Moth had pushed herself further.
After Xena ended its six-season run in 2001, Lawless never landed a role as indelible. She felt “a slight boredom” with acting, that it was “a narrow prism.” “A huge part of my acting career has been selling, being a good show pony,” she says. “I always accepted that’s part of the job, to put on a short skirt and tap dance.” On the Xena set, she and her co-stars jokingly called directors “chumps du jour,” because TV directing “looked like clock watching and compromise” to them.
But directing Never Look Away “stretched me to my breaking point,” Lawless says. “It changed how I think about myself. It answered questions I didn’t know I had, about not living up to my potential.
“Film directing is much more satisfying than acting, and much scarier,” she continues. “When I read a script as a director, I’m reading it through so many windows of my mind: sound design, lighting, sets, special effects, character, the money of it all. I’m hungry to get back into it. My three children are grown, and now it’s my time. It’s go time. There’s no one to impress anymore, no one to attract. There’s only do.” She’s developing a new documentary, as well as two feature scripts.
Directors need superpowers, too. Here’s Lawless’s: “I love human beings. I want to save humanity, by radical acceptance. Stop denying that our foibles are what make us intriguing. We relate to Margaret not because she’s a good girl or a bad girl, but because she’s a flawed human being. I’m learning to accept that in myself, too. You can’t be everything to everybody.”
Lawless was awed by Moth’s fearlessness, and she’s determined to keep some of it for herself. “If I embark on an endeavour and fail, it’s not death, so why be afraid?” she says. “Anyway, death will come – she’s coming for you, so get your camera ready. That’s what Margaret did, and that’s what I intend to do. Storm on.”
Sign up for The Globe’s arts and lifestyle newsletters for more news, columns and advice in your inbox.