Lawless, now 56, admits that, despite years of encouragement from her husband, she “never, ever” wanted to direct.
“I don’t know why I thought it was such a bum job,” she says. “But I got this email from Margaret Moth’s best friend, who said ‘do you want to make a film about my mate’s life? I’ve got a suitcase of her memories.’
“And I was possessed in that moment by this zeal that I can’t quite explain. It’s like she grabbed me and booted me through the directing door. It was nothing I wanted to do before; now it’s all I want to do.”
Margaret Moth’s career took her to many global trouble spots.Credit: SXSW Sydney
The fascination was that Moth was a remarkable character – a fearless correspondent in such trouble spots as Baghdad, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of the Congo] while being an unashamed hedonist who enjoyed booze, drugs and casual sex.
“As feminism was just ramping up in the ’70s, she had already eschewed everything about the roles of women in society,” Lawless says. “She had gone and got her tubes tied – she just knew motherhood wasn’t for her.”
Lawless says she was so possessed by Moth’s story that she committed to directing despite not being sure she was qualified to do it.
“She made me brave,” she says. “That’s the lesson of Margaret Moth – it’s about living up to your potential.”
While it seems like it could have been a strong biopic along the lines of the coming Lee, which has Kate Winslet as war photographer Lee Miller, Lawless says a documentary seemed more challenging, and it was possible to get cracking more quickly.
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“I started just as COVID was starting to bust out,” she says. “I was so afraid we would lose some of the participants due to this unknown worldwide pandemic that I grabbed a friend and interviewed people in America who I thought wouldn’t be there if I didn’t get funding for 10 years.
“Eventually, we did get funding … and two-and-a-half years after that first email, we were premiering at Sundance, which was the biggest surprise of my life.”
Lawless says Never Look Away is not strictly a documentary in that it’s not about material facts.
“It’s a documentary-style film because it’s about subtext,” she says. “It’s about who’s telling the truth, who’s a reliable narrator, because the testimonies don’t quite line up.
“So I’ve got Margaret’s lovers with competing narratives, and they’re really fun. She was a wild woman in terms of sex, drugs and punk music. All her colleagues were [stunned] to see this film and realise who their lauded colleague was in her private life.”
Never Look Away screens at South By South West Sydney, which runs from October 14-20. Lucy Lawless will speak at a cinema Q&A and a session about her life in film and television.
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