The making of a prime minister

Friday, 31 January 2025

The makers of a documentary that chronicles Dame Jacinda Ardern’s political rise and fall say they are delighted with the response the film has received at the Sundance Film Festival.

Directed by Kiwi Michelle Walshe and American Lindsay Utz, Prime Minister is one of 10 films screening in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the long-running festival in Utah’s Park City this week. All five scheduled sessions, which includes one in Salt Lake City, have sold out.

Speaking to Stuff to Watch the day after the movie’s premiere last Saturday (New Zealand time), Walshe described seeing the film in a packed house of around 1300 people, including Ardern herself, at Park City’s Eccles Theatre as “a joy”, while Utz said “you could feel the emotion in the room – and it was extraordinary”.

“After we left the theatre, we could barely walk down the street without getting stopped by people who were at the screening – and they were kind of gushing about it.”

As well as a look back at the turbulent times she faced during her five years as New Zealand’s 40th prime minister, the documentary is also an intimate portrait of what her life was – and is – like outside the Beehive. While featuring archival news footage, recordings made by Ardern’s partner (now husband) Clarke Gayford and audio from the Alexander Turnbull Library’s Political Diary Oral History Project (to which Ardern was a regular contributor from August 2017, when she was deputy leader of the Labour Party) provide the heart of the story.

“Clarke was filming for posterity, for Neve [their daughter]. He knew it was a special moment in time,” explains Walshe, best known for record-breaking 2016 documentary on former All Black captain Richie McCaw (Chasing Great). While she can’t say how many hours of footage were captured, “he certainly picked up the camera many times – and many times she [Jacinda] was like ‘yeah, no’.”

So how did this all end up in a documentary to potentially be seen by viewers around the globe?

“I’d been around Jacinda and the Labour Party a little bit before she was the Leader of the Opposition, through working on Labour’s election campaign – and so had some of my team. We had watched her up close and she was a real inspiration,” Walshe says.

“When she finished up in politics, it just seemed like a really obvious story that a lot of people would resonate with – not just in New Zealand and not just [those interested] in politics. Once we decided to go ahead and make the documentary, we really wanted an international perspective on it as well. So we approached Madison Wells, a production company particularly passionate about telling stories about women and leadership, and we were very lucky that they brought Lindsay on.”

For her part, experienced editor Utz, whose CV includes Apple’s Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, award-winning Taylor Swift doco Miss Americana and Netflix’s Martha (on American icon Martha Stewart), says signing on to the project was “no-brainer for me”.

“Like many American women, I had admired her from afar. We’ve never had a female president. It’s something that we all want – one day. Her style of leadership – to lead with compassion, empathy and kindness – that’s something that resonates deeply.

“When Covid was happening, I remember watching her briefings. They would air them on American cable news. There was a real desire for science-based leadership and knowing what was happening, because, in those early days it was just so confusing and you weren’t sure where to go for information. She just came across as so confident and inspiring.

“And, of course, [earlier] when she passed the gun legislation [in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks], that was a moment that really resonated with me and American parents. Because we live in fear of, unfortunately, our children being hurt at school. I think about it every day when I drop my kids off. So she obviously caught the world’s attention when she led the ban on assault rifles.

“Of course, Jacinda is now living in the States, so we had this incredible opportunity to interview her after her resignation, which is woven throughout the film. Michelle and I are so proud of those interviews and because she’s [Jacinda’s] writing a book [her recently announced memoir A Different Kind of Power], she’s in this very reflective place and she was able to kind of dig deep and talk about her experience, which, at the time, I think she was still really processing.”

Those interviews also gave the pair a chance to reacquaint Ardern with the audio from the Turnbull Library’s diaries project, recordings Walshe describes as “a documentary maker’s dream”.

“It’s really incredible, as a documentary maker, to watch somebody reflect in real time. She genuinely didn’t think those recordings would be heard ever. To watch her listen back and reflect on her time, which had been so wild and tumultuous, it was just extraordinary.”

Utz says one of the biggest challenges was making those reflections “feel like you were sitting next to her and she was telling you a story”. “It was important to us that it never played like a ‘master interview’.”

She is also at pains to point out that Ardern never wanted to be involved in the decision-making or editing process of the film. “She gave us all the space to find the film as we were making it. There’s no script and she never told us that we couldn’t use something. That is a true gift, when you have a subject that is willing to be vulnerable and show the good, the bad and the ugly.”

As for the biggest challenge of making Prime Minister? Walshe cites the logistics of “moving terabytes across the Pacific” and having teams “working in three time zones”. Then there was the added difficulty of trying to get a final cut ready for Sundance while the Los Angeles fires raged around them. “One night, I got home and the fire was outside the window of my hotel. Lindsay’s family had to evacuate, we had no power, I slept on her couch …”

“I think what’s really beautiful,” Utz chimes in, “is two teams, two countries really came together, and, despite the logistical challenges of that, we were all so aware that what we were crafting was bigger than us. There was a sense of needing to persevere and get this film over the finish line.”

Although buoyed by word that the world premiere had sparked interest from potential buyers, Walshe says that “feels really secondary” to her. “As documentary makers, you really thrive on being able to tell a story that may impact people. You don’t set out to sell things, you do it because you want to impact people and the planet – ideally for good.”

“That said,” Utz interjects, “It would be nice to get global distribution.”

She says she is particularly curious to see how New Zealanders respond to the film, although Walshe already has some ideas about that.

“I genuinely think, call me naive and optimistic, regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, where you sit on your experience of New Zealand at that time, for me this is a deeply fascinating story of up-close leadership that may never happen again like this.

“You have intimate access to a world leader going through some of the biggest crises of our time.

“For me, it’s bigger than New Zealand, it’s bigger than politics, because it’s a story about a human overcoming some pretty challenging things and it’s a pretty intimate portrait. Fingers crossed, people come to it with that in mind – watching a human trying their best.”