Mandy Walker AM ASC ACS on how she became a cinematographer
In her career to date, cinematographer Mandy Walker AM ASC ACS has built an acclaimed, wide-ranging body of work across genres and continents, with directors including Catherine Hardwicke (on the feature Red Riding Hood), John Curran (Tracks), Gavin O’Connor (Jane Got a Gun), Ted Melfi (Hidden Figures), Hany Abu-Assad (The Mountain Between Us), Niki Caro (Mulan) and Marc Webb (Snow White). Her work with director Baz Luhrmann includes the features Australia and Elvis; for the latter, she earned ASC and ACS awards and an Oscar nomination. In this interview, Walker discusses her early inspirations, her first jobs on set and her first big break as a cinematographer. She also offers her perspective on the director-cinematographer relationship and her close collaboration with Panavision’s Dan Sasaki.
Early Inspirations
Images made a very early impression on Walker. “My mum used to take me to galleries when I was in a stroller, when I was 2 years old, and throughout my childhood,” she reflects. “And my family always went to the cinema, and I loved reading and storytelling. And so, when I was about 13, 14, I got into stills photography. I had a dark room in the backyard, and I kind of thought, ‘Well, if I put all these things together — storytelling, art, photography, and cinema — why don't I become a cinematographer?’”
Soon thereafter, she made her first humble forays into shooting motion pictures. “I started making short films at school on Super 8,” she shares. “I did try and get into film school, and they didn't take me in the film school in Sydney. So I ended up getting a job on a movie as a production runner. And then, while I was there, I was talking to the camera crew and other people and told them, ‘This is what I really want to do. I really want to get into the camera department.’ And then somebody referred me to someone who was doing a documentary, and I got a job on that as a camera assistant. And then I was a loader on feature films, focus puller, camera operator, and cinematographer.”
First Feature
Walker has never been one to let an obstacle stand in her way. She notes, “I always believed in myself to keep going and be up against obstacles, in that I was the only woman shooting movies at that time. And there were hardly any females in the camera department in those days, which is like ’80s and ’90s.”
Her tenacity paid off relatively quickly when she was offered her first feature film as a cinematographer. “My first big break,” she remembers, “I'd been working with Ray Argall, who was a cinematographer, and he got a film up as a director, and he said, ‘Mandy, do you want to shoot it?’ I was 25 years old, I'd just been doing some short films and music videos. And I went, ‘Yeah, all right.’ And he said, ‘I'm not going to tell you what to do. I want you to work out how to do this job and have your own opinions and work out the look of the movie.’ So he kind of threw me in the deep end, and I then kept going after that.”
Working With Directors
“The way that I decide to do a film is if I like the script and the director and I are going to have a good working relationship, because all directors are different,” Walker says. “Some are very visual and some are not. Some will say, ‘Well, I've got this idea about how it wants to look. You go off and research how we get this onto the screen.’ Some say, ‘I've got no idea how I want you to shoot it. Help me here.’ I have to do tests where I can show the director my ideas and whether they like it, or they want to push it further, or pull it back, or try something different.
“All directors have the story in their head, and then I just have to work out how to get that out and turn that into images,” the cinematographer adds. As an example, she offers, “When I was working with Ted Melfi on Hidden Figures, we had so much to do that I said to him, ‘Just give me a slug line for every scene.’ Sometimes it was one word, like ‘happiness’ or ‘defeat.’ Then I kind of approach it emotionally to what's going on with the character.
“There's a lot of different ways of representing an emotion on screen — for instance, with lensing, with focus, with light, with camera moves,” she continues. “So if I know what we're trying to say, I can work out a different way of saying that, that works for that particular scene.”
A Special Relationship
Over the course of her career — working in Australia, the U.S., the U.K. and beyond — Walker has developed a close collaboration with Panavision, and in particular with Dan Sasaki, Panavision’s Senior Vice President of Optical Engineering and Lens Strategy, and the Special Optics team he leads. “I always go to Dan Sasaki at Panavision in Woodland Hills, very early on,” Walker explains. “On Mulan, I was showing him some Chinese art and paintings and looking at some Chinese films from the past that had martial arts or battle sequences. I'd say, ‘I really like that about that. And I love this painting of this mountain. I know you can't make a lens that's going to look exactly like that, but that's the feeling that I want to get.’ And he sort of sits, and I see all the cogs in his brain going around. And inevitably, he finds something. So that's a special relationship for me, a very important, special relationship.”
With credits as wide-ranging as Australia, Hidden Figures, The Mountain Between Us and Elvis, it’s no surprise to hear that Walker is always eager to push herself in new directions. “I always like having a challenge on a movie,” she says. “When I'm reading a script or talking to a director and it's something I haven't done before, that really interests me.”