The Secret Weapon of ‘Elvis’ Has Spent Her Whole Career Proving the Industry Wrong

Every scene in Elvis showcases a cinematographer of tremendous confidence. The dizzying musical sequences, the feeling of the camera always swirling and bouncing and zooming—it’s one thing to keep up with the energy of director Baz Luhrmann, and quite another to not only meet it, but enhance it. That’s the achievement of Mandy Walker, both due to her shorthand with Luhrmann—they’ve collaborated for decades, most notably on his epic Australia—and to her own scrappy career, one that’s required shattering glass ceilings while acting like a chameleon from movie to movie.

A native Australian, Walker has known she wanted to be a cinematographer since she was a teenager. But vanishingly few women had that job, and she’d hear things, both as a kid and as an adult, that indicated too few saw a problem with that status quo. But as she tells Vanity Fair over Zoom in a wide-ranging interview, she forged ahead. She proved to be a fast learner of tremendous range, able to wring cinematic power out of everything from Shattered Glass’s newsroom cubicles to Tracks’s punishing Australian outback. She’s worked to improve her discipline’s representation in her role as a branch governor in the Academy. Now she’s a first-time Oscar nominee—the third female cinematographer ever to be recognized by her peers—and could become the first woman to win the whole thing.  

Vanity Fair: You’ve been working as a cinematographer for a long time, you’ve worked on movies that have been nominated for Oscars, and you’re an Academy governor. What does an Oscar nomination mean at this stage of your career?

Mandy Walker: This is my sixth year as a governor, so I’ve been to a lot of the other events and seen my fellow cinematographers get recognized, and it’s really great to be encouraging towards them. But now, it’s just really special, especially to have been nominated by my peers, because the cinematographers chose the nomination. 

It’s a big moment, obviously. You’ve worked your way up in this industry for decades, so I’m wondering, what other big career turning points stand out for you?

Elvis was my 21st feature film, so I’ve shot a lot of movies. I came from Australia, starting off in very small indie films. So the biggest moment in my career before this was when Baz gave me the job to shoot Australia. No other woman had ever shot a film with that scale before. It was 2006 or something.

You’d done a Chanel short with Baz before Australia which is not quite the same scale.

Yeah, he had seen a film that I had done called Lantana, and that’s how I got my first job with him. I’d also shot a lot of high-end commercials, so I felt like I was ready to jump onto something big. It was a moment where I knew I was making a big leap, but I felt very confident about doing it.

As you mentioned, though, a woman had not shot a film of that scale at that point. What kind of resistance were you facing, coming up in the cinematography world?

When I first started, there was hardly anyone. I remember doing a work experience when I was 15 at a TV station for two weeks, and they said, “Oh, we don’t have women in the camera department here.” It had been my passion since at least my teenage years to be a cinematographer, because I loved cinema, I loved art, I loved storytelling. It seemed like a natural place for me to go. I got a little bit of pushback from some people, bullying, and some people not liking that I was there—not being a team player. I really just ignored it, because I knew this is where I wanted to be and I was going to forge ahead. I was always taught that if I was passionate about something, I’d be able to see it through. I didn’t let it hold me back.