Alex Casey meets the Southland principal who wrote and directed a feature length fantasy epic starring the whole school.
Ask a primary school principal how many feature films they’ve made, and most will say zero. Ask Steve Wadsworth, principal of Winton School in Southland, and he will say not one, not two, but five. His latest feature, The Great Sword of Isthgul, is a soaring fantasy epic in which a pair of siblings traverse snowy mountain peaks, magical forests and wild river rapids on their quest to find a mystical sword. Nobody in the 270-strong cast is over 13 years old.
“I’ve always coined it the primary school version of Lord of the Rings,” laughs Wadsworth over the phone. It’s the very start of school holidays when we talk, but he’s still in his office at school overseeing a few renovations and catching up on some work. A principal’s to-do list is never done, especially not when you add “make a feature film” to your list of responsibilities. But Wadsworth says making movies with his kids is an essential part of his role.
“From day one, even when I was a trainee teacher, I’ve said that school needs to be fun. Yes, it’s about reading, writing, maths and all that jazz – but it’s also about the arts,” he says. “Kids need to have the opportunity to discover hidden talents, to create, and to shine.”
Having directed annual school productions for decades, Wadsworth first decided to pivot to making a school-wide feature film while working at Bellevue School in Tauranga nearly 25 years ago. “Everybody watches TV, everybody watches movies, so I just thought ‘let’s try and make a movie’ even though I had no experience.” That movie was called The Great Treasure Adventure, following a group of kids invited on a mysterious treasure hunt in the Pacific.
“It was pretty ad hoc, but it worked,” says Wadsworth. “I wrote a script, but the shooting days were pretty much everybody just turning up in costume, and hoping the kids had remembered their lines.” Next came Isla Bank School’s The Shed (“an alien crash lands, befriends a local boy, and it was a race against time to get him back into space”) and Pahoia School’s SOS: Save Our School (“about a greedy property developer who wanted to tear the school down”).
It was at the end of the 2000s when, as Wadsworth puts it himself, things started getting serious. Still at Pahoia School, his teaching colleague Andy Tate had written a film script called the Great Stone of Isthgul, complete with an enormous cast of characters, creatures and magical lands deeply entrenched in fantasy lore. He enlisted the help of another friend, Billy Edwards, to compose an original score for the film which, again, starred the entire school.
“I just wanted children to appreciate the sort of mahi that needs to happen behind the scenes for a movie to be created,” he says. “There’s mistakes and there’s all this boring time while the cameras and sound are getting set up, and they get to experience all of that. But then for them to then see the finished product up on the screen, they can make that link back to those shoot days, and see something which flows and forms a part of this bigger storyline.”
The fictional world of Isthgul was then left undisturbed for over a decade, until Covid got in the way of Winton School’s end-of-year stage show plans. Wadsworth, now the principal there, was left with a bit more thinking time. “I just thought ‘bugger it’,” he laughs. “Time to introduce the movie making concept to this school and this community – but this time I wanted to do it on a different level. I didn’t want to do the camera work myself and I wanted proper lapel mics.”
In 2021, he rang up Andy Tate, holder of the creative keys to the kingdom of Isthgul, and asked for his blessing to write a sequel to their 2009 film. “That was a school of just over 200 back then. So I had to create some more creatures, more lands and so forth for the 270 Winton kids,” Wadsworth says. He announced the project at the school’s end of year prizegiving, and set about getting permission from parents and auditioning kids for the lead roles.
Production on The Great Sword of Isthgul started in January 2023 and lasted most of the year, with shoot days relegated to Fridays, some weekends, and during the school holidays where necessary. “It was a challenge. First and foremost, I’m a principal, so I have all my principal stuff to do too,” Wadsworth explains. “It was a lot of late nights working out all the logistics of portaloos and buses and parent transport and costuming, and liaising with the crew.”
Except this time, Wadsworth wasn’t working alone. He had the help of cinematographer Samantha Robertson from Recce Films, a small crew of year eight camera assistants, his daughter in London drawing up shot lists and his wife at home making all the costumes. But even the best laid plans were occasionally thwarted by weather and sickness. “To make a feature length fantasy film in Southland in the middle of winter was perhaps not the brightest idea,” he says.
One of the more challenging scenes to shoot was on the river, where the adventurers are travelling in a makeshift boat. “For health and safety, we needed to have a couple of jet boats just out of shot. And the river was quite high on that particular day, so the kids were floating down the river quite fast and there’s logs and bushes and everything sticking up… They all had life jackets on underneath their costumes, but it was still a bit scary.”
That treacherous river is also one of the many locations that The Great Sword of Isthgul shares with The Lord of the Rings, which filmed extensively in the area over two decades ago. In one particularly staggering scene, the two main characters are walking over a snowy peak against a jaw-dropping, jagged vista of mountains. “A local helicopter company did a really good deal for us on that,” says Wadsworth, explaining they had just an hour to get the shots they needed.
There’s a lot more to love than just the scenery. The movie, available to hire on Vimeo, is packed with hilarious dialogue, including a self-aware running gag of characters always saying “what do we have here.” The siblings traverse many different lands and encounter different colourful groups of people and creatures, each expertly played by a different class from Winton School. There’s trolls and troglodytes, fairies and even a chief with an exceptional mullet.
The Great Sword of Isthgul premiered at the Invercargill Christian Center to a crowd of 400. “It was a packed house, red carpet, limousines, merchandise, everything,” says Wadsworth. The merch included limited edition T-shirts, behind-the-scenes photobooks and collectible character cards – buy all 15 and they create a full map of Isthgul. Cast members, aka the whole school, turned up in their glad rags and held up props from the movie against a themed photo wall.
And when the lights dimmed and the crowd hushed, Wadsworth was the only person not looking at the screen. “I had watched the movie six times already, so I knew what was coming. I spent most of my time just looking around and watching all the open mouths and people just soaking it all in,” he says. “It was just this massive sense of achievement for everyone involved, and the most rewarding project I’ve ever worked on in 30 years as an educator.”
Like many films, production on The Great Sword of Isthgul ended up going slightly over budget, and a year on from its release is yet to break even. But Wadsworth says he doesn’t care about the numbers: “We’re a few thousand short but, as the board agreed, it’s the memories that these kids and this community has of making a movie that makes it all worthwhile.”
And given the parallels with our most famous fantasy franchise, could there be another film on the horizon to complete the trilogy? “My answer to that should be that if I want to remain married, then there won’t be,” says Wadsworth. “… But I do want to do one more before I retire.”
