Until five days ago the Australian cinematographer Mandy Walker was widely considered an outside contender among her fellow Academy Award nominees. While a box office hit, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was up against Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front for best cinematography, the latter a harrowing pageant of graphic battle scenes and vast shattered landscapes. The film’s director of photography, James Friend, has already collected the best cinematography gong at last month’s Baftas.
Then at the weekend Walker made history, becoming the first woman to take out top honours at the American Society of Cinematographers awards. Since then her Oscars odds have changed dramatically.
If the Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based director of photography wins best cinematography on Sunday, Walker will take her first-in-the history-of-film-making titles to three, having already won for Elvis at Australia’s Aacta wards in December.
Only two other female cinematographers have been nominated in the Academy Awards’ 95-year history: American Rachel Morrison for Mudbound in 2018; and Ari Wegner, also an Australian, for The Power of the Dog in 2022.
“While the cinematographers’ branch [of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] has a notoriously poor track record in honouring diverse artists — no Black director of photography has ever won the category and only two have been nominated – Walker might have an edge,” Variety suggested 10 days before her ASC win.
In her speech at the ASC awards in Beverly Hills on Sunday, Walker dedicated her victory to “all the women who will win the award after me”.
And while the interminable rounds of media interviews the cinematographer has been contracted to give betwixt Elvis’s release and Hollywood’s night of nights must surely be both gruelling and repetitive, the 59-year-old camerawoman does not appear to tire of discussing the inevitable question of gender in film-making.
“It is getting better and I’m excited to be part of that,” Walker told Guardian Australia.
“When I first started, there was just me. I was there by myself a lot of the time with all men. So it’s definitely getting better but … well, it still isn’t the norm for a woman to be head of the camera department shooting a movie.”
Walker says she places a priority on mentoring other young women in the industry.
“I want to train as many women as I can to be good at their job,” she said. “The industry can take its pick of good people and they aren’t all necessarily white men.”
Walker, who worked on a previous Luhrmann film, Australia, first worked with the director on the memorable 2003 Chanel No 5 commercial featuring Nicole Kidman. Luhrmann had been impressed with Walker’s work on Ray Lawrence’s Lantana, which was co-nominated with his own Moulin Rouge at the 2001 Aactas for best feature film. Neither won but Luhrmann’s partner, Catherine Martin, went on to win two Oscars for costume design and art direction for her work on Moulin Rouge.
These days if Baz comes calling, Walker says, he becomes her priority. “If I know I can go back to Australia to work with him at any time, I drop everything … he usually gives me early notice.”
Luhrmann and Martin’s signature hyper-real visually opulent style sits in stark contrast to the harrowing look, feel and scope of a film like All Quiet on the Western Front. Yet it may be Walker’s painstaking attention to historical detail that gets her over the line on Sunday.
She used myriad lenses and colour filters to recreate each distinct era in Presley’s career, from the early years in Tupelo and Memphis, to postwar Berlin, to the neon lights of Las Vegas. Hundreds of hours of archival footage was pored over to replicate the lighting and camera angles used during Presley’s live concerts and television appearance throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Walker’s choice of spotlights, backdrop colours and zooms in the recreation of Presley’s 1968 TV special were duplicated shot-for-shot from the original show, Variety noted.
Walker has discussed in multiple interviews the challenge of using camera language to “dance” with the Presley persona.
The film’s star, Austin Butler, was put through months of choreography training before shooting began and Walker and Luhrmann were present at much of it, plotting angles with as many as five cameras.
“The film was a 93-day shoot, and we had over 100 locations [most of the film was shot on Queensland’s Gold Coast]. So we were actually moving pretty fast. But by being prepared, with all the plotting and planning before, we’d figured out how to dance with Elvis.
“And then we were able to fly with him.”
If Walker finds herself on the podium of Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre clutching a gold statuette, “it will be like something that I dreamed of when I was about 15”.
“When I first started in the industry it was a little bit of a shock that there weren’t many women in my department. But I just powered on and kept doing the best work I could to get to where I am.
“If it means by winning it’s going to open the doors for other women to come in, then cracking the ceiling will feel great.
“It will say, ‘We’re here.’ Women are here, we’re doing great work and being we’re recognised for it.”
