Three months before Lucy Lawless’ directorial debut Never Look Away was set to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, she watched bombs fall in Israel and felt the film die.
“In the week following October 7, I had what I felt was a certain realisation that my film was dead. It’ll never get seen, because it’ll be seen to be political,” she tells 9honey Celebrity.
Watch the trailer above.
Though the documentary has nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas war that broke out on October 7, 2023, Lawless feared it would be canned as the conflict erupted. She was wrong.
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Never Look Away tells the story of Margaret Moth, a celebrated CNN photojournalist who spent her career capturing the horrors of war on film.
Horrors like the ones the world is watching play out in the Middle East again today.
“We had locked the cut before October 7, before this all kicked off. We weren’t trying to be topical. It just became topical,” Lawless says.
Never Look Away began with an unexpected message from Moth’s oldest friend, Joe Duran, who reached out to Lawless a few years ago with a simple question: ”Do you want to make a film about my best friend?”
In that moment, Lawless felt like Moth had picked her to share her story.
“Something possessed me to say yes and make all these rash promises that I would find the money and I would find the team and make this happen, realising the minute I pushed send that I had no business making such promises,” she admits.
“I’ve never done it before but like I said, I was just possessed by her from that moment on. And two and a half years later, we were at Sundance.”
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Though it premiered in January 2024, three months after the Israel-Hamas war began, and explores the horrors of global conflicts, Lawless insists Never Look Away isn’t a film about war; it’s a film about Moth, and above all else, humanity.
Born Margaret Wilson in Gisborne, New Zealand in 1951, Moth’s siblings, whom Lawless interviewed for Never Look Away, claimed she was was subjected to physical, verbal and emotional abuse as a child.
Lawless suggested “the emotional neglect … was worse than the beatings”.
So she changed her name to Margaret Gispy Moth, dyed her hair black and wore thick black eyeliner, and became New Zealand’s first female camera operator before moving to the US.
“Nobody had paved the way for her to do all the things she wanted,” Lawless says.
“She just knew she had to get out of where she’d come from and the confines of the roles of women in the ’70s, and go and live life on her terms.”
When she wasn’t behind the camera, Moth embraced a ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ lifestyle, taking acid with young lovers and going skydiving for fun.
Describing Moth as a ”ferocious hedonist”, Lawless was adamant about including all of Moth’s jagged edges in the film, regardless of how audiences might respond.
“I wanted to put this on screen, warts and all,” she says.
“The minute you start pretending somebody is holier than thou, who cares anymore? I don’t. I’m not interested in saints. I’m interested in shedding light on our humanity.”
So was Moth.
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She landed a job with CNN in 1990 as one of the network’s first female camera operators and leapt at the chance to cover the Persian Gulf War, where she found her calling surrounded by gunfire.
The next two years were spent between conflict zones, where she witnessed the abject horrors of Georgia’s civil war and the Bosnian War through her camera lens.
Some of what she captured was too raw to show in Never Look Away.
“I believe in showing the truth on the screen, but you would have people vomiting in the theatre … if you showed war as it is. People couldn’t handle it,” Lawless confesses.
Moth witnessed the worst of humanity and refused to look away. It made her an incredible photojournalist, and put her at terrible risk.
On July 23, 1992, Moth was in the back of a press van racing along Sniper Alley in Sarajevo when a loud crack rang out.
A sniper had just blown off the bottom half of Moth’s face.
Moth was airlifted to the US and spent weeks in hospital undergoing countless surgeries, which saved her life but left her permanently scarred and unable to speak clearly.
That wouldn’t stop her from returning to Sarajevo just a few months later to keep working.
“She had never developed as a child, in my opinion, the capacity to feel sorry for herself,” Lawless says.
Even when Moth was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2007, she rejected self-pity. Moth died on March 21, 2010, in best friend Joe Duran’s arms. She was 59.
She spent the better part of her life filming in war zones and witnessing horrors like the Qana massacre in the ’90s, when the Israeli military fired artillery shells at a United Nations compound housing hundreds of civilians in then Israeli-occupied Southern Lebanon.
It’s hard to watch the footage she caught that day and not draw parallels with current global conflicts, a fact Lawless is all too aware of.
Even so, she says Never Look Away isn’t trying to send a political message.
“We weren’t trying to be provocative. It’s just this keeps happening, but it’s happening with exponential force, which is kind of terrifying.”
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Never Look Away will be premiering at SXSW Sydney on October 16. Information and tickets here.
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