In a war zone, CNN photographer Margaret Moth did not flinch. When others dove for cover in the middle of shelling or gunfire, she held firm and got the shot.
“She was fearless. She was always cool,” one of her admirers says in the documentary Never Look Away, directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Lucy Lawless. “She was calm, collected. She was recording history.”
The award-winning film, which is in contention for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards, screened as part of Deadline’s virtual event series For the Love of Docs. It shows the unorthodox way Moth, a New Zealand native, lived her life; for instance, when she was a 30-year-old camerawoman working for a TV news station in Houston, she began dating a 17-year-old local high schooler named Jeff Russi. Lawless, herself a Kiwi, intentionally opens the film with Russi’s recollections of that relationship.
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“I didn’t want to do a linear story – ‘Margaret Moth grew up in New Zealand, went to school, XYZ, very boring,’” Lawless explained in a Q&A after the FTLOD screening. “We decided that the strongest place to start was ‘Mystery woman shows up in Texas, can’t remember anything about her past, takes up on a sexual relationship with this too young chap,’ because all of those things are lean-in moments. You’ve got to hook your audience the first 20 seconds… It’s a little bit of the shock and awe — as I know about, when you’re creating a television show, you need to shock and awe. You need to start a buzz.”
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Moth covered the Persian Gulf War for CNN and filmed in war zones from Lebanon to the Occupied Territories, Zaire (present-day Congo), Somalia, Chechnya and the Republic of Georgia. She became a favorite of U.S. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in the first Iraq War, often smoking cigars with the commander of coalition forces. And when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein hurled SCUD missiles toward allied positions, she kept her camera rolling.
“Margaret felt that she always made very calculated risks, that she was not at all reckless,” Lawless observed. “She felt she calculated the odds, and for the most part she won until calamity came calling.”
Calamity came during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992 when Moth was on assignment for CNN. In the city’s notorious Sniper Alley, the vehicle she was riding in got hit by rifle fire, and she was struck in the jaw and nearly killed.
“Let’s face it,” Lawless said, “the only time she got maimed was when she was sitting in the back of the car going towards work with her colleagues.”
To help viewers visualize this critical moment, Lawless and writer-producer Matthew Metcalfe tapped Weta Workshop, the famed New Zealand special effects house, to create a diorama, allowing the filmmakers to illustrate the progress of the vehicle on its fateful course. Metcalfe said the idea was inspired by something he had seen in his youth in Canberra, Australia.
“At the Australian War Memorial, they have these dioramas of the First World War because … they needed a way to show the citizens of Australia what the soldiers who had gone over to Europe and the Middle East had experienced. And, of course, there was very little by the way of movie footage and pictures. And so they built these huge dioramas,” Metcalfe said. “I remember saying to Lucy, ‘… Perhaps we could build our own version of that to show this aspect of the story …’ Collectively, we all rang up Sir Richard Taylor at Weta and went, ‘Here’s one out of the bag for you. Can you build a series of giant dioramas?’ ”
Metcalfe continued, “These are huge cardboard cities, effectively, built that had to sit in a huge studio in order to sort of fit them. But that’s the story of how they came about.”
After her terrible injury, Moth would endure two dozen surgeries to repair her jaw to the extent possible. Remarkably, she eventually returned to work documenting war. Moth’s untimely passing, at age 58, resulted not from the violence of war but from a terminal illness.
Lawless’ directorial debut has screened around the world, beginning with its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Among the prizes it has claimed are the Women of WIFF Award at the Windsor International Film Festival in Ontario and the jury award for Best Documentary Feature at the Calgary Underground Film Festival in Alberta.
Watch the full conversation with Lawless and Metcalfe in the video above.
For the Love of Docs is a virtual Deadline event series presented by National Geographic. The series concludes next Tuesday, December 3 with a screening of another Oscar-contending documentary, Blink, directed by Edmund Stenson and Oscar winner Daniel Roher.