“Oh, it was beastly,” declares Lucy Lawless. The star, best known for her performance in the hit series Xena: Warrior Princess is sitting in the Toronto office of Canadian distributor Films We Like to discuss her feature directorial debut Never Look Away during Hot Docs earlier this year. After gripping audiences with a career as an action performer, Lawless embarks on her most thrilling adventure yet: telling the story of late cameraperson Margaret Moth, the New Zealand native who chronicles urgent human rights stories for CNN. (Read our review here from Sundance earlier this year.)
Never Look Away, which opens in theatres this week, explores Moth’s story through many of the gripping archival images she captured from the front lines of conflict zones, including the Gulf War and the Bosnian War. However, Lawless admits that the circumstances of video journalism from Moth’s days, what with their big honking Beta tapes and all, proved a daunting task for an archival film. Outlets simply didn’t keep much of the material Moth shot. The images they did, moreover, often went uncredited.
“That was a massive problem in obtaining archive, specifically Margaret’s,” Lawless says, after pouring the coffee herself.
And yet from the images that Lawless does source, one immediately gets the fatalist fearlessness that proved Moth a maverick storyteller. Never Look Away recounts the story of a woman who didn’t flinch while staring down death through her viewfinder, even after a carefully placed bullet in Sarajevo’s “Sniper Alley” blew off her jaw and part of her face, nearly leaving the figure of beguiling Goth-like beauty for dead.
Never Look Away reminds audiences of the power of the on-the-ground journalism that reports from the thick of conflict. Lawless gives audiences a sense of Moth as both a woman and as a storyteller by inviting figures from Moth’s life—colleagues, past lovers, family members—to reflect upon a complicated woman with a sharp eye and an addiction to the adrenaline rush of reporting from the front lines. It’s an appropriately “beastly” endeavour that honours a woman who never took the easy option.
POV spoke with Lucy Lawless about Never Look Away earlier this year.
POV: Pat Mullen
LL: Lucy Lawless
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: It’s interesting how you open with an interview with Margaret’s former boyfriend, Jeff Russi, and he’s talking about the unconventional relationship he had with Margaret, in that they got together when he was a student and she was in her 30s by then. That relationship was obviously in “a different time” and might be complicated for audiences today, so why choose that story as a jumping off point?
LL: It seemed to me that the strongest way to start was with a mystery woman who shows up in Austin, Texas and can’t remember anything about her past. That’s a barn-storming entrance rather than saying, “She was born in New Zealand in 1951 and this is her family.” There’s no mystery in that. For me, documentary is about cherchez la femme. It’s always about the hunt for something and the audience leans in because you are leaving dissonance or loopholes in the knitting. Then they fill it in with their own judgment.
The dissonance between what people are saying and how they’re saying it, and how that lines up with somebody else’s observation hooks the audience intellectually. They’re calculating, “Where’s the truth?” The audience gets to make up their mind who she is. I’m not telling them. The minute you have your subject expounding on their view of reality, all the pressure goes out of the pressure cooker. I think it was an advantage that my subject was dead.
POV: How do you find the essence of the character if you’re on that same sort of journey as the audience?
LL: I was on exactly that journey. It took me the longest time to figure out, way into editing, what made Margaret that way and what was the nexus between her natural self and the character she became. And what sparked the change. I realised that the pitilessness of her childhood didn’t kill her. It made her stronger so that when death came for her and ripped off her face, she had no pity even for herself. She was able to overcome this assault to her body and being when much younger soldiers would’ve died from the trauma. That was what the doctors were saying: it’s unbelievable this 42-year-old woman should be able to survive this
POV: What’s the challenge of telling the story of someone who’s always behind the camera?
LL: There was very little evidence of Margaret on camera, but—God bless her—she had saved some of the 16mm stuff that she shot in New Zealand when she was an art student, footage that she had swiped from the art school. She couldn’t have afforded the film herself. Moreover, camera people of that era, when we went back looking for Margaret’s own archive, they didn’t get credits.
The news reports were edited in the field, and then they would satellite back the finished news package to Atlanta and all of that B roll, all the offcuts, were just lost, destroyed. Some of the videotapes, the great big beta tapes were sent back to Atlanta and they couldn’t store them all. There’d be millions and millions of great big hoary videotapes. They were destroyed. I tried to do due diligence by going back through all her press passes and visa stamps and go to events I knew she was at. But there is probably a good deal of other people’s work in there. That’s just the way it has to be to take the audience on the rollercoaster ride. I’m really open about that.
POV: How did you choose which world events to focus on in the story? Was it the power of the footage or the ones that helped hit the story beats?
LL: Hit the story beats. It was the big ones that she was at, of course, like the Gulf War. That was intoxicating and, I guess, the action climax in the story. And somehow, I had this feeling about Qana, the Lebanese massacre. I was doing research and watching YouTube, just trying to understand this event, and some Iranian kid had been shooting that day. And then I went, “Oh my god, wait, back that up. That’s Margaret. That’s got to be Margaret on the ground.” I found somebody who had captured her and she was the first person with a professional camera there. But this kid, an Iranian filmmaker, had been there the morning before and a little after. Margaret was already there when he arrived again. You see that footage. That’s actually Mohamad Reza’s footage. Margaret was already there, but unfortunately a lot of her stuff was destroyed in that inability to store data.
POV: We get two key sequences of the film with miniatures, when Margaret is shot in Sniper Alley and then when she’s at the Holiday Inn in Lebanon and takes her camera to the roof when everyone else thinks they’re going to get hit. Can you talk about that creative decision?
LL: The problem with this story is that there isn’t archive to cover the darkest, most personal moments. Obviously she’s not filming herself losing her jaw. We had to find a way, and it was not my idea, I think it came from [producer/co-writer] Tom Blackwell, he said, “What about diorama?” And as a child of the ’70s, I was like, “That is so old it’s fresh again.” Diorama was our CGI. That was our way of creating worlds. Budget constraints taught me that it’s what you don’t have that creates style, or can create style if you look at it the right way. So you can have x number of buildings. They can only be two colours. You can only have one colour of buildings and one colour of figurines. And then you ask about sky–are we going to do green screen? They’re like, “Can’t afford green screen.” I was like, “Okay, what about a black curtain?” And I was drinking from this Starbucks cup, which has the white buildings on black relief, and I was looking at that and saw it’s perfect.
I thought, if we can only afford certain colours, let’s make it crushingly uncomfortable, so all the colours shouldn’t naturally go together. We’ll have this apricot light and green skin for the faces, the grey of the buildings or in Lebanon, make it a biscuity colour to give that dried, desiccated feeling. The sound design is created in order to compress the experience to make it feel uncomfortable and ratchet up the tension a little bit. I wanted it to sound like submarines: claustrophobic.
POV: What I really like about the dioramas is that they show you Margaret’s fearlessness because there was no one else to get the shot. The absence of archive there tells you so much about what she’d step in front of to get those images. There’s a dramatic impact of those sequences.
LL: I was nervous about that. Would it be enough? I wish that the fighter jets had come back [when Margaret was filming atop the hotel], but they didn’t. I couldn’t lie about that. But if death was coming for her one more time, she’s going to film it as it comes to take her out. There is every chance that she could have been obliterated in that building. Her camera was her mainstay and it was her weapon against death. Didn’t run away though.
POV: Never Look Away is a film about a cameraperson, so what role do cinematographers play in your work?
LL: They inform the look and make an audience feel a certain way. We wanted that sense that you are sitting across from the table speaking directly to [the interviewees] and to make it look lush and warm and convivial like you are in a late night café or one of those jazz videos on YouTube, some fantasy kitchen. That’s down to the cameraman. Had I been more experienced at the time, I would’ve followed my instincts a little more. For example, Margaret’s boyfriend, [sound recordist] Yaschinka lives in this sort of little Lord Fauntleroy four-story manse on the outskirts of Paris. He dresses in slightly Renaissance/Louis Couture clothing like a gypsy king. I think I would have interviewed him lying down on the chaise with his trumpet gramophone over his shoulder because that’s him. That was my instinct, and I wish I had pushed that one. It would’ve ruined the convivial kitchen thing, but it would’ve been more provocative.
POV: How was it interviewing Margaret’s family? There’s so much that goes unsaid as they’re describing her childhood.
LL: I love the family. They’re all such splendid people, but they’re not close themselves. The reach of a pitiless childhood and unloving parents goes deep through the generations. I don’t know quite where it started, but that was a bad legacy that was passed on to those kids. That’s why Margaret didn’t want to have children herself, plus she was busy. When Jan [Margaret’s sister] watched, I was nervous, but she was like, “Oh, great film!” They don’t feel sorry for themselves. None of them. They just don’t have any sentimentality about any of it. That’s what made them great interviews. They weren’t trying to protect Margaret or the family or anything. They did back away a little bit from their initial interviews, but that’s their prerogative. They were really open: the drugs, the young men, all of it.
If you don’t have the wherewithal to obsess for years at a time on a project, then you shouldn’t be making it. – Lucy Lawless
POV: I assume people had approached you before about films to direct. What about this one in particular attracted you when Joe Duran approached you on behalf of Margaret’s estate?
LL: I don’t know. I had no intention to direct. It was like Margaret reached out from the Netherworld, and made me make all these rash promises: “Yes, I’ll find the money.” [Laughs.] I was full of fear that this was a form letter. Surely, it’d been sent to me as just one of a hundred people. But I thought, “I must make this film” and I was only thinking about producing, really. I didn’t have any thought of directing at the time.
But after a couple of weeks when we were discussing, and I’d made all these rash promises that I can find the money and proper producers, who should we get to direct? And somebody said, “Why don’t you?” I said no, but my second thought was, well, why not? Nobody who cares about this like me. If you don’t have the wherewithal to obsess for years at a time on a project, then you shouldn’t be making it.
POV: How has looking at Margaret’s story and all these hours of news coverage made you look at the state of journalism in general?
LL: It’s made me much more circumspect about what I see and much more suspicious of potential propaganda, of messaging. Never mind who by. As they say, the first casualty of war is the truth. It’s made me understand that on a deeper level. I don’t jump on causes the way I did [before]. Currently, there’s a lack of respect for nuance. There’s a lack of patience for proper communication of very complex issues. You can hurt people because of that lack of nuance in the world. People are just hitting one another with cudgels and hitting inappropriately.
POV: How has making your first feature given you a new perspective on the business side of filmmaking?
LL: It’s bloody tough out there. My film got made because of the cultural significance of Margaret in my country. We got some overseas investment, but the lion’s share came from the New Zealand Film Commission. What I’m learning is that you have to pay attention to the business of showbiz and that there’s a whole industry of people who are looking to sell to advertisers before they’ve even green lit your production. As a creator, it’s horrible to hear, but the people who greenlight movies are not creatives, so it’s naïve to not account for that. I’m trying to develop a couple of ideas, which my husband tells me quite art house, but I believe in them.
POV: So Never Look Away isn’t a one-off for you as a director?
LL: Oh no. I’m horribly hooked now. I can’t wait to jump back into that moat of sharks because you’re problem solving on so many levels every day. It’s very addictive. I’m working on three projects at the moment in different stages of development, but I really believe in them.
POV: Are they docs as well?
LL: One doc, two scripted.
POV: What did looking at Margaret’s story teach you?
LL: The message of the film is kind of like what she’s done for me in my life, which is that you have no reason not to reach your potential. If there’s something out there that’s a little out of reach, jump a little higher and it can be yours. I didn’t really see this coming. I didn’t have an ambition to be a director, and she booted me to making a hard left turn in my career. It’s extremely exciting. That’s the message I want to give to the audience: who are you not to be fabulous and talented?
POV: Inevitably, at some point, someone will make a documentary about you—
LL: No evidence. [Laughs!] There’s no evidence. Don’t talk about that.
POV: But you’re Xena, you made this film, you’ve had an incredible life from where I’m sitting. What sort of direction would you hope that someone takes in telling your story?
LL: Don’t care. I feel like Margaret: “Go for it.” I’m not interested. I’m here for the ride. I’m so not interested in what other people think. Any film I make is going to be as prismatic as possible: an array of outcomes that the audience can have a conversation about afterwards and disagree, but still feel really passionate about their point of view.
