Interview with “Prime Minister” Directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe

In Prime Minister (which I reviewed at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival), directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe craft an engaging portrait of former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Using a wealth of archival material—much of it captured by Utz (and her husband) and Ardern’s partner (now husband), Clark Gayford, over the years—Utz and Walshe humanize their subject while exploring her politics and governance record. In a world of bellicose would-be fascists, we need more Arderns. The film begins its theatrical release in the United States on Friday, June 13. Below is the interview, edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: How did this project begin and how did you launch into making a biographical documentary about Jacinda Ardern?

Michelle Walshe: I’m based in New Zealand and my husband Leon Kirkbeck and I have a production company here. We were very lucky to meet Jacinda before she became Prime Minister and to work on her Labor campaigns. So, we have a couple arms of our business and one is documentary and the other is more purpose-led marketing work. And I remember Leon coming home after meeting her and just going, “Wow, that woman is just extraordinary. She just has this magnetic energy and she’s just got a whole different set of values and it feels really fresh.” And so we built a relationship a long time ago, and then throughout working on her campaigns and just being in and around her, we were very lucky that she allowed us to roll cameras. I think as a historian, she’s a real lover of history. While she didn’t want to entertain making anything specifically, she was happy to have cameras there sometimes. And so we were able to do that and were there for some really pivotal moments.

And then Clark, of course, whom we knew, as well, was filming stuff. We didn’t quite realize how much at the time. It’s very lucky, as he was a filmmaker many moons ago and a presenter. And he just picked up the camera and started documenting for their daughter and for history. So when she resigned, we approached her about making a documentary, and at that point she was like, “OK, maybe, let’s see what happens.” And we went to get financing and we came across Madison Wells Media who, from a values perspective, really aligned with us. They introduced us to Lindsay and we really wanted that international perspective, as well. So even though I had lived in the States—because we lived in the States for a couple of years during Jacinda’s term—we understood there was a really different viewpoint needed that was really critical to capture in the film. And so Lindsay came on as my co-director.

CLR: Lindsay, from your perspective, how was it pitched to you and what was it like coming aboard?

Lindsay Utz: I got a phone call and was told that there was footage that existed of Jacinda behind the scenes during her time in office. And as you can imagine, I was very excited about that. I had admired Jacinda from afar for many years. I think a lot of people had, especially about her leadership on guns during COVID. I was very, very much attached to her from afar. I thought she was such an incredible leader. So when I got this phone call about this project, I only had to see about two minutes of the material to know that this was unprecedented access and likely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be able to be that up-close-and-personal with a leader during her time in office. That’s just something I’d never really seen before. And so I jumped very quickly at the chance to do this.

And we had lots of meetings with the New Zealand team. Did we share a vision for what it could be? Did we all like each other? And we did. And we all felt like if we came together and did this as a team, we could bring this out into the world in a really big way. And so it really became two countries and two teams coming together to do this thing. And at that time, Jacinda was in the States; she’s been based in Cambridge since leaving office. And Michelle and I really felt like the story was still unfolding. We wanted to talk to her in depth about her experience. And then of course we had access to all these incredible audio diaries that had been recorded while she was Prime Minister.

So Michelle and I spent time with her in Boston and interviewed her extensively. And we tried to continue the intimacy that had already been started with all those years of filming, and we continued to film and then put together what we hope is this very inspiring portrait of a leader. And what we’re seeing as we share it with audiences is that people are desperate for some inspiration, for some light and love and hope, and that the film is really resonating right now with audiences because of what’s happening politically here in the States.

CLR: You had so much to work with, in terms of footage. It must have been quite a challenge determining the structure of the film; or maybe it wasn’t, maybe you just, boom, had an idea. But could you talk about figuring out where to start and then how to work in all the information that you wanted?

MW: I think the first block of the cut was 17 hours.

CLR: Wow! I would watch that!

LU: There is a lot of good stuff that couldn’t make the final cut!

MW: This isn’t the kind of film where you write a script and then hand it to an editor. It was really like, “Let’s lay the material down.” And Lindsay and I have such a shared way of working. It’s like, “Where do we feel emotion? Where are we drawn to the footage?” Of course there’s a chronology, of course there’s information that we had to put in, but we were led by how we felt and what moved us because it was never supposed to be a historical look at Jacinda Ardern’s time in office. It was an intimate portrait of a world leader navigating some of the biggest crises the world’s ever seen whilst balancing the pressures of being a new mom. And so that was what led us—those intimate stories—and we leaned hard into the access.

LU: And in terms of structure, I think we knew that we wanted the film to be anchored by her voice. So our interviews are woven throughout the film, but we never wanted it to feel like a master interview, if that makes sense, because we wanted you to feel like you were sitting next to her and she was telling you a story. And so using the audio diaries and listening back to those and then shooting her listening to them became a kind of narrative device. We didn’t know if it was going to work. Obviously, you don’t know if those things are going to work. You shoot them and then you figure it out. And like Michelle said, we very crudely chunked together the pieces and put together this 17-hour cut. And we were like, “Oh, I think it might work.”

Because really what we were doing was running a cinéma vérité story in real time in the past, but then you also have this reflection in the present day. We never wanted you to feel like you lose the propulsion of the story that’s moving you through her political experience and her time in office. It was a tricky thing to keep the audience in that story while also having these moments of reflection. And that just takes time. It took a year to edit the film and it was a lot of trial and error.

MW: And you put things back in. You’re like, “Oh, we thought we didn’t need that and now we miss it.”

LU: Yes.

MW: It’s very iterative. It’s like in-out, expand-contract.

CLR: Somewhere out there, there’s a longer Frederick Wiseman-type cut of the film.

MW: There sure is.

LU: Yes, there is. But we really wanted this film to be tight. We knew we wanted this to reach a big audience, and you have to consider those things when you’re making a doc, the pacing and the timing of everything, to get as many people as possible in the door.

CLR: Right. That’s a legitimate concern. You want people to want to watch your film. So, a lot has happened since you completed the movie for Sundance. Have you tweaked the movie since then, considered a coda, done anything, added a text card, or is this the same version that I saw at Sundance?

LU: Same version.

MW: I wish we had the chance to tweak some audio. We finished audio during the fires in L.A. and there are parts where Lindsay and I still go, “Ugh.”

LU: Well, we lost power. The studio lost power that day because the Santa Ana winds were blowing so strong and we lost some work.

MW: You never finish, right? (laughs)

LU: (laughs) Yeah, you never finish. There are things I’d like to tweak, but no, we have not. But it’s definitely been interesting because everyone was so raw and Trump had just been inaugurated at Sundance and with the fires it was a real moment in time, but as we’ve taken this film out and watched it now that we’re deeper into the administration, I’ve seen the intensity and feeling that people are having for this film grow even more palpable.

CLR: I have a question about the footage taken from public protests outside of that building where the government sits in New Zealand. There are people on screen who were captured for news footage, but now it’s in a different kind of work, in a documentary. Are there any legal concerns in that repurposing that you have to have your lawyers look at to make sure you’re covered?  

LU: Yes. In fact, we had to do a final legal pass and there were some particular shots we had to replace for legal reasons. And yeah, that’s always the case with these documentaries. You have your cut and then the legal goes through and says, “You can’t use that person’s face for this reason.” So we definitely had to do that. And you’ll see we had to blur out faces and moments, as well.

CLR: That’s always a solution, I assume, to blur them out. Speaking of those protests—that very loud group of people who hated Ardern’s COVID-19 policies—what is happening in New Zealand now that a more conservative government has come in after Ardern? Are we seeing the same kinds of issues as we see here in the States?

MW: It’s really difficult, I think, for all of us to judge how representative that loud minority is and it’s really difficult to understand how big that movement is. I think the oxygen isn’t there in the same way it used to be. I think the conservative government has probably swung too far even for some of the people who were hoping for a conservative government to come back in, swung to a level of discomfort, especially around some of our indigenous issues. And so, as we’re seeing in Australia, we’re swinging back to the more liberal side of things, which is hopeful.

I feel like the temperature around that time and Jacinda and Labor has changed, but there are still people who feel a lot of resentment and anger around COVID. And Lindsay and I talk about this. I think that time was so difficult for so many people across the world, and I think there’s a sense that you want to put a face to the pain and anger. And unfortunately, that was Jacinda’s government, and Jacinda in a lot of cases. That’s not to say—and I’m not going to get into policies—that people didn’t have valid disagreements, but I think around the world we saw these pockets of people who just felt so much rage and so much hurt. And I don’t think any of the leaders who went through COVID survived unscathed.

CLR: Biden’s government here was blamed for things that were out of its control. I’ll personally never quite understand the rage over public-health policy, however. 

MW: It’s interesting when people say, “Did you see what they did to the government?” It seems so odd to me because I’m like, “But it was a pandemic.” I don’t really understand the psyche.

CLR: I don’t either. So, in the editing process, as you were narrowing down from your gargantuan 17-hour version to this final cut, how did that collaboration between you two work?

LU: Yeah. Co-directing is a gift, and Michelle and I have talked about this because you bring two different perspectives and there’s that push-and-pull that I think is really important. But we wouldn’t have come together to do this had we not shared a vision for what the film could be. And we have very similar tastes: we like the same movies, we like to hold on shots, we were stylistically in sync. From a practical standpoint, the editing took place in the States. Michelle came over a bunch during different points in that process. And I have to credit our two editors, Grace Zahrah and Enat Sidi, who did an extraordinary job. Since we don’t have scripts, when we put together these docs, editors become really critical to the crafting of the film. And so this really is such a collaborative effort on every front.

And so we did the 17-hour cut, then we did a 5-hour cut, and then I think it went back up to a 7-hour cut. And I call it the accordion process where you just have to do this until it gets smaller and smaller. So it was a lot of just generating the long cuts and then talking about it. And Michelle would say, “Oh, well, what about that one bit?” And she would remind me of something that we had in a longer cut, and it was a lot of that back and forth. But it’s definitely tricky when you have one director in New Zealand and one here.

MW: I think it would’ve been more just generally fun if we were closer, because when Lindsay and I are in the suite, we have these funny moments where we get really excited together when something’s fitting like a glove. And I really enjoyed that process, but we also chunked out different roles. Lindsay had a huge job of bringing in the archive. I looked at a lot of the audio diaries, the 40 hours of audio diaries. So we shared different parts and we’d share together things that were resonating and we’d have conversations, and then I’d send long pages of notes and we’d try to talk through them, and then we’d wrestle again with footage. And it was actually incredibly easy, given how difficult it should have been.

CLR: Well, I think the end result is a really good documentary. Thank you for making it and thank you for talking to me. 

LU/MW: Thank you!