Paramount Pictures thriller ‘Condor’s Nest’ has Frederick County ties

BY CRYSTAL SCHELLE Special to The News-Post

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At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazis fled Europe to several South American countries to hide from prosecution for their war crimes.

In Phil Blattenberger’s sophomore film, “Condor’s Nest,” he shows how far one American soldier will go to enact revenge for the heinous crimes he witnessed. The action-adventure, rated R, is set to be released Jan. 27 nationally in theaters and on demand.

Blattenberger, who grew up in Hagerstown and spent some of his childhood in Frederick County, wrote and directed the film. With a master’s degree in anthropology and time spent studying historical archaeology, Blattenberger found the history interesting enough for a storyline.

“Something like 10,000 Nazis fled South America after the downfall of the Third Reich and set up shop in South America,” he said during a telephone interview from his Greensboro, North Carolina, home. “They tried to hide away and take regular jobs and disappear.”

Although Blattenberger said two movies have previously dealt with the same subject matter, 1978’s “The Boys from Brazil” and 2018’s “Operation Finale,” but his script takes a different approach.

“This was sort of a relatively untouched canvas upon which we could take a really fun actionadventure-turncoat-thriller and sort of grab a paintbrush and just start composing a story,” he said.

“Condor’s Nest” isn’t the first time that Blattenberger has delved into war as a backdrop. His debut film, 2019’s “Point Man,” dealt with the Vietnam War and garnered him praise, accolades and awards. The film earned him a nomination for Best First-Time Filmmaker at the St. Louis International Festival. At the Sydney Indie Film Festival, he was nominated for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay and walked away with the top prize of Best Picture.

Blattenberger started writing the “Condor’s Nest” script mid2018. By 2019, the film moved into pre-production — gathering props, scouting locations and getting ready for filming.

“We spent about a year building a B-17 bomber out in a field in North

A scene from “Condor’s Nest.”

Carolina,” he said.

But then 2020 happened, shutting down production and forcing them to move filming to 2021. COVID-19 safety protocols still had to be followed during production.

“Logistically, navigating the challenges was just an immense undertaking,” Blattenberger said. “But we pulled it off safely, which is a credit to the COVID safeties supervisor and all of the competent staff.”

As for the nature of the script, Blattenberger and his crew had to find locations that gave the feel of Argentina and other South American countries. A Mount Airy location was used to film an interior scene, where Will (played by a Liam Neeson-esque Jacob Keohane) first meets Leyna (Corinne Britti). They also shot on location in North Carolina and Utah.

In “Condor’s Nest,” American war veteran Will has tracked a Nazi Col. Martin Bach (Arnold Vosloo) to a remote location in South America to kill him. But Will stumbles upon a secret Nazi headquarters called the Condor’s Nest.

“Jacob was great. He had a heavy role handed to him here,” Blattenberger said. “ He had to sort of internalize a lot of rage and guilt. He’s got a lot of gravitas and was really able to bring kind of a layer of performance to something that demanded some real nuance.”

In addition to Keohane, who starred in 2021’s “Halloween Kills” and 1999’s “The Mummy,” there were several other recognizable faces” Michael Ironside (“Top Gun”) Jackson Rathbone (“Twilight”), Jorge Garcia (“LOST”), James Urbaniak (“The Office”) and Academy Award nominee Bruce Davison (“X-Men”).

“We were trying to pull more recognizable names nationally,” Blattenberger said.

One of the enormous demands on the actors was learning German. Blattenberger said they had discussed actors speaking English with German accents, which often happens in films. But he, along with the production staff, decided to have the actors say their lines in German with English subtitles because it worked better for the overall film. In one particular scene that involved a group of actors around a table discussing an archeological find, Blattenberger said having them speak with German accents would have made it feel more like a farce.

“James Urbaniak, who plays Heinrich Himmler, was, to me, the most impressive,” Blattenberger said. “He’s the one who had to lead off the scene, and everybody else was teeing off their beats and timing off of him. And he just pulled it off without a hitch.”

Blattenberger credits the actors for digging in and not only learning the lines in German but understood what they were saying and thereby including the correct inflection of certain words.

He also credited Washington, D.C., actor Torsten Kellar, the only native German speaker in the same scene. The evening before the shoot, Kellar spent several hours with the actors in the scene, helping them to not only learn their lines correctly but to learn the timing as well. Blattenberg called Kellar “the axle of the wheel” for that scene in particular.

Crystal Schelle is a journalist whose work has been published locally, regionally and nationally.

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