Lucy Lawless is best known as the iconic star of groundbreaking feminist cult fantasy drama Xena: Warrior Princess. It seems logical, then, that she’d be drawn to the life story of fellow New Zealander Margaret Moth, a photojournalist for CNN who covered some of the most dangerous and terrifying conflicts and catastrophes.
However, this time Lawless isn’t playing Moth, but examining her life as a first-time director with Never Look Away. The film, which plays at AFS Cinema this weekend, is a documentary about Moth’s drive to document perilous environments across Africa, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Like her peers, she put her life on the line every time she stepped off the plane, with only a flak jacket and press credentials to protect her. Lawless said, “She felt very much that she calculated that risk and won.”
However, one day that risk caught up with her, and Moth had to rebuild her life without the distancing security of a lens between her and reality. Lawless said, “Margaret was absolutely pitiless about herself, but through this great calamity she learned to love the world.”
Austin Chronicle: What was it that made you want to tell Margaret’s story?
Lucy Lawless: I feel like she possessed me. I literally feel like somebody else made me say, ‘I must make it! I’ll find the money!’ I’d never done that before and I had no intention of directing, and a few weeks later somebody else suggested it and I realized that I couldn’t pay anybody to care as much as I do. That’s not a money thing. So I don’t know. There was just something weirdly metaphysical about it.
AC: Your approach, especially at the beginning, is not to focus on the stereotypes of the combat zone journalists, to make them almost holy figures, but to talk to her lovers.
LL: What interests me is the subjective accounts, especially when they don’t line up. It’s really fun for an audience to be deciding at every moment, ‘Do I believe him or him or her?’ and that was my experience making this film. They’re all really credible but they can’t all be telling the truth about Margaret, so you get to decided who you believe in this war of subjectivity.
I’m not a journalist. I’m not interested in giving you the ABC’s account of events. I don’t give a shit about that. I want to reveal human nature. I guess that is the female gaze, to be boring about it. Then bringing the family in quite late, about two-thirds of the way into the film – that’s about when I discovered the family, about two-thirds of the way through the process. Only by meeting them I could understand what bound together all these disparate accounts because she’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. And then I met the family and, ‘god, they’re all like that.’
AC: Some people are just attracted to the damage. Margaret could have gone off and become some cool punk chick, but instead she goes off on this deranged path.
LL: Your word!
AC: I say deranged because there’s something about going into a war zone and thinking a journalist’s blue helmet will save them.
“Margaret would always parachute over the abyss. She wouldn’t jump, but she’d parachute.”
So the day I interviewed Christiane Amanpour was that day after Russia invaded Ukraine, and all of them, including her, were jonesing to get going. Not in an excitable way, but in a frenetic, terrified kind of way. The fact that she would give us 40 minutes and 40 minutes only to talk about a fallen comrade speaks to the devotion they hold for one another.
AC: One major barrier for reporting on Margaret or any war zone journalist is that they’re missing from the pictures because they’re on the other side of the lens. How did you learn to fill that gap and find her?
LL: It’s really difficult, because there is a dearth of visual information about camera people. I got really lucky. I found her in the back of a shot of an Iranian filmmaker who was present at a catastrophic event in Lebanon. I saw it on YouTube and went, ‘Oh my god, that’s got to be Margaret!’ and I went through many travails to acquire his footage.
And there’s stuff in here that’s not Margaret’s work in all likelihood because camera people didn’t get credits in those days. So I went and looked up her passport and press pass details and tried to make it comport with that. Anecdotally, I knew she was at certain conflicts, but it was difficult.
AC: Margaret captured some very graphic images, and some of the images of her after she was shot are also very graphic. Photojournalists and editors discuss constantly how much to show and how much to hide, so how did you draw your line on when something’s too much?
LL: That was a collective decision, because I’ve got a cast-iron stomach. I’ll look at anything. I’m quite interested in everything. But we decided that the point at which we decided to draw the line is the point at which they’re vomiting in the aisles. I want them to lean forward, but the point at which they become nauseated and fall over and puke, you’ve lost them anyway, and you’ve lost everybody around them. So we went for the highest common denominator of tolerance.
Never Look Away screens Sunday, March 16 and Monday, March 17 at AFS Cinema, 6259 Middle Fiskville. Tickets available now at austinfilm.org.
This article appears in March 7 • 2025.