Q&A: 'Condor's Nest' director talks new movie, Nazis and growing up in Ohio
Writer-director Phil Blattenberger has traveled a long and winding road to Hollywood.
A native of Maryland, Blattenberger studied history and anthropology at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. In pursuit of a master’s degree from UNC at Charlotte, he traveled to Vietnam for research. Stimulated by the experience, he wrote a screenplay about the Vietnam War as something of a lark.
That became his debut directorial effort, the 2018 war drama “Point Man.”
On Friday, Blattenberg’s sophomore effort, “Condor’s Nest,” will have a limited theatrical release that doesn't include Columbus, but the movie will be on available demand wherever digital content is offered including Dish, Spectrum, Comcast, Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu and YouTube.
Owing more than a little to Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” “Condor’s Nest” stars Jacob Keohane as an American World War II veteran who journeys to South America to round up an assortment of ex-Nazis. Bruce Davison, Michael Ironside and James Urbaniak round out the cast.
Part of Blattenberger’s own journey included a childhood spent, in part, in the Buckeye state: The future filmmaker’s family moved around a lot, living some of the time in Minnesota, Colorado and, during a chunk of his adolescence, Cincinnati and Wilmington in Clinton County.
“I love Ohio,” he said. “I was a classic Midwestern kid. I grew up fishing in different lakes and tromping around in the woods. ... I’ve got nothing but good memories; it was a great place to grow up.”
In 2001, Blattenberger’s family relocated to North Carolina, where the filmmaker still makes his home. In a recent phone interview with The Dispatch, he talked about his new movie.
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Question: Were you a big movie buff growing up?
Phil Blattenberger: Weirdly enough, no. I was kind of a weird kid. I always had my nose in a book, or I was always outside. There was actually very, very little TV or movies consumption.
If I had to credit it to one thing, it was seeing the original “Karate Kid,” which came out in 1984 and I didn’t see it until probably ’95. I was a little behind the times there. It got me extremely interested in martial arts, which is something that I started when I was 10 or 11, and then just for the heck of it, I wrote my first screenplay at 12. It was this goofy karate movie about some teenage detectives that were doing karate and shot it (using) a little home camcorder. That was my first and only foray into film.
Q: Where did you get the idea for “Condor’s Nest”?
Blattenberger: We took something that would be inherently fun — a classic Nazi-hunting mission across South America — and decided that the best way to approach that subject matter, to make it unique, was to infuse it with a little bit of Tarantino-esque irreverence for history while honoring the important aspects of the groundwork, and infusing that with an “Indiana Jones”-esque layer of adventure. We have this heavy geographical arc across Europe and then South America, from the fields of Europe into the coastal plains of Argentina to the jungles of Paraguay and into the mountains and deserts of Bolivia.
It was a chance to take an audience on a ride, and if you’re going to tell an audience that you’re going to give them a Nazi ass-kicking movie in South America, you better deliver. That’s exactly what we tried to do.
Q: Where did you shoot the movie?
Blattenberger: We shot the vast majority in the U.S. In fact, the only stuff we shot in South America was B-roll pickup shots, and that was to set establishing shots before you cut to your interiors.
All those interiors are Charlotte, North Carolina; Greensboro, North Carolina; Rocky Mount, North Carolina; Mount Airy, North Carolina. The opener that’s supposed to be in France is actually eastern North Carolina, which doubles beautifully for eastern French farmland. ... Hopefully, anybody who has not been to Peru will assume that it’s South America.
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Q: How did you balance the tones in the movie?
Blattenberger: It’s grounded in historical reality. There were 10,000 Nazis who fled to South America after the fall of the Third Reich, and most of them did try to take margins-of-society jobs and blend in and live a normal life and disappear.
If you are dealing with material that is as dark as a bunch of murderous Nazis doing very awful things and trying to revive a political movement in South America ... that gets dark real quick. It gets un-fun to watch, and it certainly gets difficult to fuse with any type of an action or an adventure. To do that, you have to write certain beats into it that are not funny by themselves but maybe contextually have a little bit of humor and subtext.
Q: What are you doing next?
Blattenberger: We are in preproduction on a movie now called “Without Consequence.” It’s set during the Cold War, out in Nevada (about) a couple of U.S. marshals that are searching for a fugitive. I can’t give away too much beyond that, but it’ll be a fun movie. It looks like we’ll be shooting in New Mexico later this year.
Q: Between Vietnam, the aftermath of World War II and now the Cold War as settings for your movies, are you a history buff?
Blattenberger: You know what, weirdly not. It’s sort of been happenstance that it turned out that way. ... Yet, at the same time, to me the most interesting thing about film, and the most fun thing about it, is getting to immerse yourself into a world you would never otherwise experience. ... I will never get to see a crashed B-17 (bomber) in a field in eastern France unless I build one myself.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Director discusses new film, Condor's Nest, set for Jan. 27 release
