Prime Video’s The Bluff is not your typical swashbuckling pirate adventure. Directed by Frank E. Flowers and co-written with Joe Ballarini, the action-adventure thriller blends historical context with visceral, hard-R intensity, set against the striking backdrop of the Cayman Islands. Starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Ercell “Bloody Mary” Bodden, the film follows a former pirate forced to confront her violent past when her old captain, Connor (Karl Urban), returns seeking revenge.

Produced by AGBO’s Anthony and Joe Russo alongside Angela Russo-Otstot, The Bluff combines large-scale action with a deeply personal emotional core — exploring identity, legacy, and the cost of survival. Nexus Point News spoke with director Frank E. Flowers about approaching the film as a “home invasion” story, drawing from his Cayman heritage, building a grounded female warrior, and what he hopes audiences ultimately take away from the ending.

Nexus Point News: Hi Frank. Thank you so much for having me. I loved your movie — congratulations.

Frank E. Flowers: Thank you, thank you. That means a lot.

In your director’s statement, you describe The Bluff as a “home invasion film at its core.” What does that perspective allow you to explore emotionally that a traditional pirate adventure wouldn’t?

Frank E. Flowers: The interesting thing about a home invasion movie is this: when someone comes into your world to hurt you, the level of violence you’re allowed to unleash — and that an audience can digest — really amps up, right? If you’re out hunting, playing ships, chasing each other, and you bash someone’s face with a conch shell, like Ercell does, you’d say, “That’s a psychopath, you gotta stop, lady, take it down a notch.” But when someone comes to your house, threatens your kid, kidnaps your husband, you can keep going.

We really wanted to push the envelope of what a pirate film could be in the visceral, raw, intense nature of the violence and the action. A hard-R pirate movie. Baking it in the shell of a home invasion movie really allows us to do that, because these pirates invade [her world]. We find out they’re connected to Ercell’s past. She’s running, and they keep coming after her. If they just left her alone, the movie would be over. But because they keep coming, she has to keep ramping it up.

It’s almost like Predator in the ’80s. The way she kills them has to become more extreme, because she’s one woman fighting guys twice her size. She has to fight dirty. She has to use whatever she can. She has to send a message with those kills.

So we get the fun and expectation of that, but the home invasion nature of it allows it to be that much more intense. And when you’re on a small island, there’s nowhere to run. You’re locked in by water. You can’t call anyone. That was a lot of the vibe we wanted to go for, to keep the action at the highest level.

You grew up surrounded by pirate lore in the Cayman Islands. How did that personal connection shape the way you chose to portray that history?

Frank E. Flowers: In the Cayman Islands, we don’t really dress up much for Halloween, but everybody dresses up for Pirates Week. It’s an annual festival where ships come in, there are pyrotechnics, sword fights. I remember being a kid sitting on my dad’s shoulders, watching it all unfold. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not, right? The pirates win. They take over the island for a week. And you’re sitting there thinking, “Are we safe?” Then they throw you a doubloon or some candy, and you think, “Okay, these pirates aren’t so bad. It’s fine.” And you start to have these really interesting, complex feelings about it.

When my writing partner, Joe Ballarini — one of my best friends from film school — called me, we have this thing called “the Bad Idea of the Week Club,” where we just pitch ideas. He said, “What about Straw Dogs with pirates?” Straw Dogs is one of my favorite films from the ’70s. I know it’s a little controversial, but it’s about a home invasion and someone being forced to go to extreme measures to protect someone they love. That idea just went in the blender, and that was a lot of the impetus and inspiration for this kind of a pirate movie.

I wanted people to feel what I felt as a kid on my dad’s shoulders. I wanted it to be exciting, visceral, a little bit scary, and then fun when you get your doubloon and your candy. It was an interesting tone that we took on, but it was very thoughtful and specifically constructed.

Ercell isn’t just fighting for survival, she’s confronting who she used to be. When building her character, how did you balance her role as a mother with the violence of her past?

Frank E. Flowers: Making a movie about a strong woman, and being raised by a strong woman, I was surrounded by strong women throughout this process. My first call was to Zoe Saldaña, who I made a movie with 20 years ago. We’ve been friends and collaborators ever since. She’s my sister, and her sisters are my sisters. So Mariel, Cisely, and Zoe Saldaña of CineStar Productions — we really went and dug deep into the heart of this story: Caribbean culture, the role of women in that society, the representation of that, what they would be fighting for. Men would go off to sea. Women stayed back and built the society.

So we started there. As the movie and the idea started to grow, we realized we needed partners who could put it on a big canvas. Zoe reached out to the Russo siblings, Joe, Anthony, and Angela, who’s an incredible producer. They were all in, and we started to develop it even more. But we had to stay true to it. We had to stay authentic. We can’t just have some magic lady jumping and doing karate flips off the ceiling and taking out 20 guys. We had to really get in there, get into the character, and make sure everything was credible, visceral, and raw. That was the sauce that made The Bluff.

And when Amazon came on board, my dear friend Amber Rasberry was our first executive, and she loves the Caribbean. She saw the value as well. The whole studio stood behind us and let us make a bloody, badass, R-rated pirate movie, which is insane that we got to do that. But it was never compromised. It was never questioned.

With Priyanka involved as both producer and performer, how did her presence shape or deepen “Bloody Mary” beyond what was originally on the page?

Frank E. Flowers: Priyanka brought a whole other level to that character. From our very first meeting, we took what was a cool paradigm — a woman with a past — and she filled it in and made it grow. She has an incredible body of work in Bollywood and Hollywood. She’s played many different types of roles. But she has this approach of just going deep and asking questions that will never be in the film but are part of the DNA. We started really diving into the history between her and Connor, and that led to a whole other level. Her instincts as both a mother and a warrior are incredibly strong. She’s one of the hardest-working people on the planet, but also so thoughtful and collaborative.

Then you bring in Karl Urban, who also has an incredible sense of character, story, and nuance. Put the two of them in a room — with me and my writing partner, who stayed on set the whole time — and we’d be going through and deepening every single moment, every single scene. It helped me as a director to know that I had two soldiers, two generals there who were going to make sure that every moment was true, and that every punch, every stab, every look, every line was authentic and driving the action and the story forward.

By the end of The Bluff, survival feels almost secondary to identity and legacy. What do you hope audiences ultimately reflect on about who gets to define history — and who gets written out of it?

Frank E. Flowers: History is written by the ones who write it down. And to make a movie where history is written in blood, it starts with this: Connor is this cold, calculated entity, and Ercell is pure emotion. She’s defending her home. She’s losing it. She’s pounding a guy’s face with a conch shell.

By the end, you get this really interesting crisscross where Connor becomes vulnerable in those last few moments. He’s starting to unravel, he’s becoming emotional rather than tactical. And she becomes cold and tactical again. And it’s this battle for their souls. Who are they going to be? Can she still be a mother? Can she still be an ordinary citizen? No, right? She’s now made peace with her past and her present, and how is that going to inform her future?

Connor was after this idea of freedom, of wanting to be free, and he’s put himself on this island where they’re trapped with each other. So right up to the last minute, you’re not sure who’s going to get out of this, how they’re going to get out, or if they’re going to get out at all. You’ve got to see the movie to really know, but we really wanted to bring it to the brink and deliver an ending that feels unexpected and fresh, but really mesh with the story and the world we created.

The Bluff is now streaming on Prime Video.

This interview was edited for clarity.