#91: Molly Manning-Walker, Cinematographer & Writer-Director

Best Girl Grip

Today I’m sharing another in-between season bonus episode that I recorded live as part of the BFI’s Woman With a Movie Camera Summit in July. My guest was Molly Manning Walker, a cinematographer, writer and director.

Molly trained as a cinematographer and graduated from NFTS in 2019, after which her graduation film November 1st was long-listed for a BAFTA. As a DP, she works across a variety of formats including documentary, fiction and advertising, and she has just finished shooting her first TV series, Superhoe, written by Nicole Lecky and directed by Dawn Shadforth and she is in prep for Scrapper directed by Charlotte Regan.

Molly’s debut writing and directing project was the short film Good Thanks, You? which premiered at the Semaine De La Critique program at the Cannes Film Festival. Her follow up short film, conceived and created during the pandemic, The Forgotten C, was BIFA Nominated. Meanwhile, her debut feature film How To Have Sex is currently in development with Film4 and Molly was recently awarded the Next Step Prize at Cannes.

I thought it was a quite a no-bullshit conversation - Molly is quite young, and to mind, very successful and on a very exciting trajectory, but she made it very clear that has only been achieved through a very strong work ethic. Listening back to it for the edit I think it’s full of quite practical advice and we talk about how limitations can be creatively useful, what support looks like on-set and how counselling and intimacy co-ordination were crucial to the making of Molly’s short film Good Thanks, You? As well as discussing Molly’s transition from shooting to directing, why she makes a habit of only using one light and what she considers to be the biggest learning curve of her career so far.

I hope you enjoy listening to it!