“She’s New Zealand’s least known famous person,” said director/documentarian Lucy Lawless about photojournalist Margaret Moth, the subject of her first feature film, “Never Look Away.” For Lawless, it’s a shame because “she ought to be legendary.”
In a conversation with TheWrap’s editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman, Lawless explained she wasn’t interested in telling a hagiography of Moth that only looked at her good points. Moth was a complex woman who made questionable choices in life, including dating a 17-year-old boy when she was a grown woman. “I’m not sugarcoating it. She was an an outrageous human being and her boundaries weren’t where our boundaries are,” Lawless said at TheWrap’s Sundance Portrait and Interview Studio presented by NFP.