How did a UNC Charlotte grad go from bartending to making a movie with recognizable actors?
There’s a reason Phil Blattenberger’s plan to try to write and direct a movie about hunting Nazi war criminals could have gone horribly, embarrassingly, life-alteringly wrong. And it had almost nothing to do with the fact that it was a movie about hunting Nazi criminals.
No, here’s the risky part:
Roughly four years ago — in the wake of completing work on his low-budget/indie debut film, “Point Man” — the UNC Charlotte alumnus started pouring an alarming amount of time and money into constructing a realistic-looking crashed B-17 bomber in eastern North Carolina, where he hoped to stage a critical opening scene of his Nazi movie. This, despite the fact that the 37-year-old Greensboro resident wasn’t sure how (or more importantly if) he’d ever be able to raise the rest of the money he needed to make the whole thing as he’d envisioned it.
“That was out of just upfront seed money, and money coming out of pocket, on a gamble,” says Blattenberger, who says creating the aircraft replica and the facade of an abandoned French farmhouse wound up costing “probably hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“Literally I’d bartend, scrap together my couple bucks from the shift and go buy lumber at Home Depot, drive 2-½ hours out to Rocky Mount with it, sleep in a mule barn, build all the next day, drive back and work another shift. Did that for about a year. It was absolutely ridiculous. ... but it worked out for us.”
He’s not kidding.
On Friday, Blattenberger’s R-rated action-thriller, “Condor’s Nest,” will enjoy a limited theatrical release thanks to a distribution deal with Paramount Pictures while it simultaneously is available to purchase through video-on-demand platforms including Amazon Prime and Apple TV.
And although the film won’t be winning any Academy Awards, its production values are impressive — not just because of that “B-17 bomber,” but because “Condor’s Nest” features faces you might actually recognize.
‘What have I gotten myself into?’
Blattenberger started making movies, essentially, by accident.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from UNC Greensboro in 2011, then another bachelor’s (in anthropology) at UNCG in 2014, then a master’s in cultural anthropology in 2016 as a commuter to Charlotte.
He paid his way through all three programs by working as a bartender. He planned to be a teacher. He had no training or experience in film or TV production.
But while at UNC Charlotte, Blattenberger traveled to Vietnam to study how the southeast Asian nation viewed America and its involvement in the war there in the ’60 and ’70s. And while there, he was struck by the idea to write a screenplay about African American GIs and racial tensions that existed between them and white members of their platoon.
“It was for fun,” he recalls. That is, until he shared it with his best friend, Dan Black, another Greensboro bartender, who told him: “‘Let’s shoot this thing and see what we can pull off,’” Blattenberger says.
“From the very, very, very conception, it was, ‘Hey, let’s go get a couple actors that want to make a couple bucks and goof off and shoot a Vietnam movie in the woods of North Carolina and just have fun with it.’ It very quickly moved beyond that,” he said. “When we put the casting notice out and got 4,000 people submitting in about a week, we realized, ‘OK. This has the potential to actually do something.’”
Black, who also had no filmmaking experience, went in on the gambit with Blattenberger as a partner, and at every turn from there on out, things seemed to fall into place.
Next thing they knew, it was 2016 and Blattenberger was showing up for the first day of shooting in Atlanta, where a film crew, a handful of actors, a Huey helicopter and a blue screen were waiting for him to tell them what to do.
“And there was this moment of like, Oh s---. … What on earth have I gotten myself into?” the nascent filmmaker recalls. “It was this real moment of impostor syndrome: I don’t belong here, and everyone knows it. But, I mean, what do you do? You either fold in that moment, or you BS it and you push through it, and you get the shot, and you learn and you grow and you keep growing from there. I think that was the case throughout the entire production for me.”
“Point Man” was, to be sure, an ultra-low-budget production. He did get some financing, and they did shoot much of it in Cambodia (as well as a little in Vietnam); but the cast was packed with unknowns, and the primary villain was played by a guy named Jacob Keohane, an aspiring actor whom Black and Blattenberger had first met when he was DJing at a club they worked at in Greensboro.
Total cost: “Right about a hundred grand,” Blattenberger says. To be clear: $100,000 wouldn’t even cover the catering for a Tom Cruise film shoot.
He was hooked, though. In fact, before “Point Man” was finished he already had an idea for something much bigger and bolder.
Finding the right men for the jobs
His pitch was simple:
“Let’s make a broadly accessible movie that has almost an ’80s pastiche to it. ... The type of popcorn movie you went to with your older brother, where he dragged you along to an R-rated movie when you were 14. You got to eat popcorn and watch Nazis get their asses kicked and it’s just a lot of fun.”
But Blattenberger certainly made things complicated by conceiving the jumping-off point for the story as a scene in which a ruthless Nazi colonel interrogates and executes a group of Americans, one by one, after their B-17 crashed during a bombing run over France.
The complicated part? B-17s are extremely rare and cost a fortune to borrow.
So Blattenberger found a guy in Enfield (a tiny town 20 miles north of Rocky Mount) who would let him take over a field on his property, assembled an art department, leaned on history-buff volunteers, and spent the better part of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 building a replica of a crashed plane. He did have some seed money, but basically he was staking everything — his pitch to investors, his pitch to actors — on his fake B-17.
Then COVID-19 came along and shut almost everything down for about a year. Everything, that is, except Blattenberger’s deal-making efforts.
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Into the fall of 2020 he kept gathering financing, then, once he’d secured what he felt was enough to get “Condor’s Nest” made, he started the casting process. And he was aiming high, certainly for someone whose sole credit was a Vietnam War movie that few people were aware of.
“The casting process was a tough process initially,” Blattenberger says. “I was going to agents who I’d never spoken with before and falling on my face and sounding like an idiot. There was a lot of that starting out, just figuring out how to talk to these people, how to make it sound like I knew what I was talking about when I absolutely didn’t.”
Then he says, again: “But I guess it worked out.”
He had already hired Keohane — his “Point Man” villain — to play the lead role of American aviator Will Spalding, who a decade after surviving the B-17 crash and the killer colonel goes on a revenge spree as he hunts down Nazis hiding out in South America. Blattenberger’s coup, though, was signing his “Condor’s Nest” primary villain.
That would be Arnold Vosloo, and even if his name doesn’t ring a bell, odds are good you’d know his face.
The 60-year-old South African actor starred in one of the most successful movies of 1999, “The Mummy,” as the sinister Imhotep, and then reprised the role in “The Mummy Returns,” which was one of the highest-grossing films of 2001.
Once Vosloo committed, Blattenberger was able to cast other actors of note for significant cameos: Michael Ironside, who played Jester in the original “Top Gun” and bad guy Richter in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Total Recall.” Jorge Garcia, who played Hurley on TV’s “Lost.” Bruce Davison, who played Sen. Kelly in 20th Century Fox’s “X-Men” movies and was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in 1989’s “Longtime Companion.”
Told that the writer-director credits him with opening the floodgates, Vosloo laughs.
“I didn’t know any of that,” the actor says. But, he concedes, “it always just takes that one person to say yes, and people are more apt to look at the material, and once they genuinely look at the material, then they’ll get on board (if it’s good). Every actor wants to say good lines, and Phil wrote some great lines.”
Filming started in July 2021, and by the time it did, Blattenberger had also given a starring role to the Tar Heel State.
‘He’s gonna make a name for himself’
Locations in North Carolina doubled for nearly everything he wanted for “Condor’s Nest.”
In addition to the field in Enfield, an apartment in Mount Airy stood in for an apartment in Buenos Aires; a bar and an alleyway in Greensboro were used as other Argentinian settings; a hotel in Charlotte was dressed up as a hotel in Cusco, Peru; and parts of the climactic showdown were shot in a suburban neighborhood in Greensboro.
Meanwhile, many of the key players are from the area, too. Scott Hunter, who lives in Waxhaw and met Blattenberger through events hosted by Carolina Panthers fan site Carolina Huddle, is one of the film’s executive producers. Charlottean Jamie Roseman served as an associate producer and has a small role early on opposite Vosloo. Another “Condor’s Nest” actor, Chad Ayers, lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Although Blattenberger declined to reveal the budget for his latest movie, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that just building the set for his full-scale B-17 replica cost more than his first one.
And his hope is that his third movie, which is already in pre-production, will be even more ambitious.
“We’re doing the same thing,” he says. “It’ll be kind of, you know, move to the next level, start pulling bigger and bigger names, while also using that buoyancy to bring up everybody that’s been there from the start and continue to help them add value.”
Blattenberger is sitting on the balcony at The Saddle Club at Seventeen Ninety-One — a private club off Brawley School Road in Mooresville, where he shot a crucial scene set in Asunción, Paraguay — and as he says this, he gestures to Hunter and Keohane, who have joined him for this chat.
A few minutes later, the now-former-bartender/full-time-filmmaker excuses himself because he has to get to his laptop for another interview, on Zoom, to promote “Condor’s Nest.”
After he’s stepped away, Hunter points out that Blattenberger seems to have been going at it nonstop for weeks now. “I’ve told Phil, ‘You could get somebody to handle some of these day-to-day logistics for you, especially on a bigger production like what’s coming next.’ But I love it, his determination and tenacity.”
He shakes his head.
“To commit yourself to basically living out of a barn — on cold nights, on steamy-hot, humid North Carolina days — building a B-17 from the ground up, building a farmhouse from the ground up — some people would start that and say, ‘Yeah, I’m in over my head,’ and bail out. But he has a commitment that’s unmatched.
“I mean, I have no doubt that in some way, somehow, he’s gonna make a name for himself in the film industry. I just want to make sure I’m along for it. For the adventure.”
“Keep an eye on that kid,” Keohane deadpans. “He got the gumption.”
“And this guy, too,” Hunter says, directing a thumb toward the actor. “We’re here to ride Phil’s coattails until we fall off.”
