Her recent films include Mulan and Snow White for Disney, the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures, and the Kate Winslet-Idris Elba plane crash romance The Mountain Between Us. She intends to keep working, but was persuaded to take on the presidency because of the message it might send about who can succeed in this traditionally male arena.
So, it’s a sort of “you can’t be it if you can’t see it” move?
“That is exactly right,” she says. “I believe in that.”
Walker decided she could perhaps actually be a cinematographer after seeing that at least one Australian woman before her had trodden that path. “When I was about 18, I found out that Jan Kenny – who was working with Russell Boyd as his camera operator – had shot a film, and I went to meet her and talk about it.”
At the time, she recalls, there were “maybe two or three women working as camera assistants” in the country. Her odds of getting to shoot a film were slim, but when she landed her first job as a production runner (a gofer) on Dusty – “I used my own car, was paid about $150 a week, and I thought it was the best thing ever” – she decided to drop out of uni and commit to chasing her dream.
The first time she felt she’d actually made it was when Baz Luhrmann hired her to shoot Australia (recut as the six-part series Faraway Downs in 2023). “All of a sudden, it’s like a $120 million film, I’m in charge of 200 people and three crews, and I just went, ‘OK, here we go, this is the biggest challenge of my life and if I succeed in this, then I’m there, I’m where I want to be’.”
Walker had her share of mentors, but she also encountered plenty of men who thought a girl had no place behind a camera.
“I got bullied a little,” she says. “But I just powered through because I knew that one day I was going to get where I wanted to go.”
The worst incident was on the set of the TV series ANZACS. “The crew used to make me and this other girl in our camera department carry all the gear in the mud, and watch us struggle through the trenches, and then we used to have to stay back late and do all the cleaning at the end of the day, and they’d just go home without helping us. It was a baptism of fire, I suppose.”
On the upside, at least you can say you’re qualified to be president of the ASC because you’ve done your time in the trenches.
“That’s right, literally,” she says with a laugh. “And I did it with a smile on my face. I didn’t let it deter me at all.”
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