Clarke Gayford on his doco Prime Minister: ‘Jacinda’s time in office was a whirlwind – we were just trying to keep our heads above water’

There are moments in Prime Minister, the documentary about Dame Jacinda Ardern, that you see coming. Her elevation to the leadership of the Labour Party and the 2017 election. The announcement of her pregnancy, alongside partner Clarke Gayford. The Christchurch mosque shootings. The pandemic lockdown announcement. The pregnant visit
to Buckingham Palace. The whole family at the United Nations. The resignation. The wedding.

But Prime Minister is something more than a scrapbook of news conference soundbites or a travelogue of international Jacinda-mania. It is sometimes those things, too. But helped by Gayford’s footage filmed along the way – he’s a media veteran as a presenter, and a producer of his own fishing show – the film becomes a remarkable backstage examination of her political and their personal lives through the period.

Gayford’s camera captures everything from funny family moments, such as his toddler daughter Neve working a room like a campaigning politician (“nice to meet you, nice to meet you”), to Ardern gazing from the ninth floor of the Beehive at the occupation of Parliament grounds and the protesters’ signs threatening to kill her.

A year later, we see Ardern at home trying to decide what to wear to her resignation announcement and Gayford filming and asking her whether she should have learnt to delegate more. He gets the sort of withering response usually reserved for leaders of the opposition and male broadcasters offering their reckons on women in power.

The documentary is a joint venture between Auckland and US production houses and directors Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz, whose respective credits include documentaries on Richie McCaw, the Wiggles, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift. Gayford is one of six producers and gets a cinematography credit, too.

It’s his first feature-length documentary, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year. When it screened at the NZ International Film Festival last month, there weren’t many dry eyes left in the house. “I definitely ruined some of my friends’ make-up,” says Gayford, who was at the documentary’s local premiere.

Prime Minister is released internationally this month just as Ardern’s second book of the year, kids’ story Mum’s Busy Work, follows her bestselling memoir into shops.

Meanwhile, after a day of getting their 7-year-old daughter to her various activities in London, where the family is currently based, Gayford is on Zoom to talk about his part in the making of Prime Minister, which, as a documentary-maker, is the biggest fish he’s ever caught.

Clarke Gayford: “We knew we should document our experience.” Photo / Supplied

We should possibly apologise or something that this is a film about a woman, made mostly by women. And here we are talking to a male producer, ­cinematographer, and husband of the lead.

Look, if it makes you feel better, I was out-ratioed in just about every single meeting on the film that we had.

Would there have been a film without your footage? And it’s more than footage – it’s its own record. Was that the starting point for everything?

Yeah, well, I guess the interesting thing is that I didn’t film all that with a hardcore documentary in mind. It just happened by virtue of my background in media and being in these positions where no media was and thinking someone should be documenting these things. Honestly, it wasn’t until we got to the end where we sat down, and I certainly had been fielding a lot of interest from other people, to go, “Okay, is what we’ve got here good enough? How, then, do we pull a team together to do it justice?”

So, when you started, you didn’t have a long-term goal for these recordings?

Just not a hard and fast plan. It was such a whirlwind. The entire time Jacinda was in office, we were basically just trying to keep our head above water. It wasn’t until the dust started to settle at the end that we had a chance to really think about things.

But it’s not just her time in office, it’s your first years as ­parents …

The funny thing is that I never even understood that any of it might necessarily be interesting to anyone else. But the way modern technology is … I was at times just shooting stuff on a phone, because that’s all I had in my pocket, but then also with a digital camera with a decent memory card. It might sit in the corner gathering dust for a couple of weeks, but then you pull it out because it’s your daughter’s first birthday, and that becomes like a cute little scene that you never thought was meant for anything else.

Ardern and Gayford meet the Queen in a private audience at Buckingham Palace. Photo / Getty Images

Did you have any pause for thought about Neve appearing in the film?

If you watch the film, we are careful with it, in the sense that you do see her when she’s younger, but she sort of drifts out, and you don’t necessarily see her towards the end, and that was a conscious choice.

When you started filming, did you ask for Jacinda’s ­permission – or anyone’s?

You can fall into that old cliche of, it’s easier to beg for forgiveness than ask permission, and going into these sorts of things, I was often just the boyfriend with a handycam in the corner of the room. So, I got the side-look from a few officials, but no one questioned what I was doing – and I didn’t know what I was doing, so it didn’t matter too much at the time.

But the driving force behind wanting to get this out there was just to try to humanise the role of a politician. Particularly in the fractured state of the world we’re in being so discombobulating for so many people. I tried to find its partner or a comparative one and there are a few follow-docs on leadership. There was one on Nancy Pelosi that was done by her daughter, but it was very difficult to find any on leadership and leadership in action. So I felt like what we had, and through the generosity of Jacinda being so open to it, was special and unique.

It’s quite special and unique when your now-wife, who is ­preparing to resign as prime minister, says you are “full-blown mansplaining” when you ask her if she should have delegated more …

Look, I’m not a trained interviewer, and it’s five times as hard when you’re talking to a loved one because there is so much more that can be read into the questions. I was desperately trying to conjure up the perfect question, and instead, I just bumbled through it, especially when I was getting the death stare and digging the hole deeper. But it was one of those moments where – because often the last thing I felt like doing was picking up a camera, particularly after she’d had a tough day and the last thing she felt like doing was being on camera – a part of us just knew we needed to document a bit of this, and we’d figure it out later.

The couple’s wedding day in 2024. Photo / Getty Images

So, does she need to delegate more?

Funnily enough, I was talking about this just the other day with someone else. I have always joked that there were three of us in the relationship – me, her and the cabinet papers – because they were just relentless … it was such a volume of reading material to get through, and she was such a pointy head that she would dive into it head first. It would be 11.30 or 12 night, and I’d be saying, “Come on, turn the light out.” She’d be like, “I have to get through these because we’ve got a cabinet meeting in the morning, and each one of these things requires a decision.” I was like, “Can’t someone summarise this stuff?”, and she’s like, “It is the summary.” She never wanted to be caught out on anything, and such was her attention to detail that she made a rod for her own back in the sense that her work ethic drove her to do it.

What was your reaction when she told you, “I’m resigning”?

It’s sort of covered in the film. I never wanted to be a reason or another thing that made her make that decision. I just always saw the most important thing I could have done in politics through all that was just to be a supportive partner. So, I was supportive, supportive, supportive until the decision was definite, and then I was like, “Okay, all right.” But I was also worried about what we were going to do next and how it was all going to unfold, because it was a big step into the unknown after five pretty intense years.

How’s the step into the unknown going?

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. Obviously, I just stepped back from my other TV projects … with the work that she’s gone on to do, which has been predominantly in this hemisphere, it’s been important for her to be here and to be ping-ponging all over the show to get those things happening. She was worried about finding things to do. But now I’m having to remind her that it is okay to say no to the occasional thing as well.

Front row seat: Gayford looks on as Ardern announces her resignation in Napier in 2023. Photo / Getty Images

What did Jacinda think of the film?

I’m trying to think what her actual feedback was – it was such a whirlwind when we screened it at Sundance. I mean, she’s still talking to me, and we’re still married, so I think it’s gone well.

How do you think you came out of it?

People have said some really nice things, and I’ve made some self-deprecating jokes about all the footage they didn’t see. But it’s not really for me to judge.

Any regrets about including the moment when your mother-in-law says “that’s unusual” on hearing the baby’s name for the first time?

That was a moment that I thought I was shooting for family, but it was just such a mum moment and the comedy in that sequence is so universal. It hasn’t mattered where we’ve shown that film. I was in Ireland at the weekend for a screening and the laugh was as fulsome as it was in North Carolina. I think everyone saw a little bit of their own mother in it, and Laurell is a wonderful woman.

There’s also that moment where anti-vaxxers turn up outside your parents’ house in Gisborne, which is just, well, sad.

It was; it was a sad time – just to watch how the misinformation wrapped people up so completely, and continues to do so. You cover the emotional spectrum when things like that happen, and feeling sad for them is definitely part of that.

Ardern with directors Lindsay Utz, left, and Michelle Walshe at the premiere of Prime Minister at the Sundance festival in January. Photo / Getty Images

You were world famous in New Zealand before you got together with someone who became world famous full stop. You were used to being in the public eye, but this whole thing was something different, wasn’t it?

It’s interesting. I’ve always said I was so thankful for having a background in media, because I’d feel so sorry for anyone’s partner to be thrust into the spotlight without understanding the way that the focus and the light get shone on you so brightly. I spent a whole career trying to draw attention to various projects I’ve worked in for TV, and then I found myself going, “Oh, I don’t want some of this,” and shying away from it.

After the resignation, your lives started a new chapter. But what was it like for both of you revisiting all those previous chapters in your respective ways?

Certainly for Jacinda and the book-writing process, it was a case of having to. So much of that we had parked. I felt very strongly about going back into some of that footage, and it immediately brought back feelings of what it was like … There’s parts of the documentary I feel very uncomfortable watching and sitting through, because it was a pretty torrid time for not just us, but all of New Zealand.

It must play very differently in New Zealand than it does overseas?

It really does. I was lucky enough to sneak home for the premiere at the Civic, having watched it at Sundance. And I’ve been travelling around the US to other screenings. It’s a great demonstration of how an audience experience of a film has so much to do with what’s going on around them in the environment at the moment.

I think President Trump was inaugurated three days before our initial screening, and then something had happened in the US by the time we’d screened in North Carolina. But for the New Zealand screening, there was almost like a lag, a sort of collective drawing of breath at the end before people showed emotion, which I found different to the other experiences.

Coming back to the New Zealand screening was the most terrifying for me; it was far more worrisome than the Sundance [screening] because I knew the audience had also been through it. So you could sort of see it and hear it in how they commented on their experience of the film afterwards.

Was it cathartic making it?

I guess so. Maybe. A couple of years later, we’re still decompressing. Look, I’ve had so many lovely messages, spontaneous messages from people [who have seen the film] and people who found that it was … healing is too strong a word, but they appreciated having the story pulled together in a way that was good for them as well. Personally, I think it’s an honest capture of the experience that we had through that period. But it’s not just our story. It’s a New Zealand story.

Prime Minister is in cinemas from September 25.

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