Laura Blum

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What is manhood? How are men to act in the world, and where do truth and responsibility fit in? Having studied boyhood in depth, now director Richard Linklater tracks the next phase of masculinity in his new film Last Flag Flying.

To help visualize the maturation arc, he once again tapped cinematographer Shane F. Kelly. They both like progressions. Their previous collaboration Everybody Wants Some!! was billed as a follow up to Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, and Boyhood—which Kelly served as camera operator before stepping in as Director of Photography for the last four years of the shoot--serialized a coming of age all in one work.

Just don’t call Last Flag Flying a sequel. Though it may seem a part two of Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, “this is a movie that stands on its own,” Kelly tells me in a recent phone chat. “It has three characters and they’re from the military,” but that’s about the height of it,” he asserts.

The mix-up is understandable. Like the 1973 film co-starring Jack Nicholson, Otis Young and Randy Quaid, it too is based on a Darryl Ponicsan novel about three Vietnam anti-heroes, only the source material here is the successor volume, set 30 years later. That’s about how long 51-year-old Kelly has lived in the U.S. since leaving the U.K, so when it came to imagining a three-decade gap, he had his own memory album to draw on. Continue here:

http://www.thalo.com/articles/view/1336/cinematographer_shane_f_kelly_unfurls_last_flag