Dustin Prince of Monticello had to learn how to scream.
While filming "An Intrusion," the thriller in which he plays the lead, Prince had to do quite a bit of screaming, which soon caused him problems. The cold Michigan weather in which the filming took place wasn't helping.
"The second night, I started to lose my voice," he remembers. "I started freaking out a little bit, because I was thinking, 'If I lose my voice, it's over. We're gonna have to stop production for at least three or four days so I can get my voice back.'"
As it happened, the director, Nicholas Holland, sings in Sunlight's Band, a black metal political grindcore band. He knows something about screaming.
"I learned that there's actually an art to screaming -- to yelling," Prince says. "He taught me .... 'Don't yell from your throat, yell from from your diaphragm.' So I started doing that, and that helped out a lot."
Audience members may have no trouble screaming while watching "An Intrusion," a film bringing a touch of Halloween to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Prince has the lead role of Sam Hodges who, along with his family, is terrorized by a malicious stalker. As an investigation mounts, he fears the attacks may be related to secrets he has kept.
The thriller, also written by Holland -- whose previous projects include another thriller, "Wronged" -- is co-produced by Emmy nominee Sam Logan Khaleghi and also stars Keir Gilchrist (Netflix's "Atypical," "Dark Summer" and "The Good Neighbor"); Billy Boyd ("Lord of the Rings" trilogy); Scout Taylor-Compton ("Rob Zombie's Halloween," "13 Going on 30") and Erika Hoveland ("Before I Wake," "Best Years Gone").
Picked up for distribution by Gravitas Ventures and making its way through such movie showcases as the Chelsea Film Festival and the Orlando Film Festival, the unrated film premiered Nov. 11 in Michigan and opens today in select theaters as well as being made available on Video on Demand and DVD/Blu-ray.
Ninety-eight minutes long, "An Intrusion" is set at Christmastime, but won't put anyone in the Christmas spirit. Darkness and wintertime bleakness are a backdrop for this fist clencher. Even the Santa figurine at the start of the movie is suitably creepy.
"An Intrusion" begins with Sam's daughter Rebecca (Angelina Danielle Cama), in the kitchen in the middle of the night, being startled by a masked intruder; the police are called and come to investigate. During a private conversation, Sam's wife, Joyce (Hoveland), asks Sam why he didn't report the recent break-in of his car, which Sam dismisses as having nothing to do with the home invasion. As it turns out, Sam is cheating on Joyce with a co-worker at the law firm where he works. Sam's infidelity is juxtaposed with his protective attitude of Rebecca and distrust of her neurotic boyfriend, Layne (Gilchrist). Sam finds out, via an anonymous email received at work, that someone else knows about the affair along with other aspects of Sam's life.
The tension intensifies as the intruder gradually turns up the heat: Rebecca and her friend find a dead, blood-soaked deer in the former's trunk. The intruder returns to the Hodges home to leave Sam an accusing, typed note on the windshield of his car and another message taped to the doomed Santa figurine. Then comes another incident that leaves Sam with something else to hide; his tormentor knows about that, too, and is bold enough to call and taunt Sam from inside Sam's house. Sam is subsequently goaded into violent vigilantism and a paranoia that soon has everybody, including Savannah Simpson (Taylor-Compton) -- the police detective on the Hodges case -- giving him the side-eye as things spiral toward a mind-blower of a conclusion.
Save for explicit language throughout, the film is one of surprising restraint. The cinematography is compelling, using music sparingly but effectively, teasing the viewer with its sudden cutaways, playing the bleak storyline up with the bleak outdoor winter scenes.
And Prince does a notable job presenting Sam as an increasingly wound-up soul who looks, as a cop observing him in one scene puts it, like he's "about one bad day away from stepping into traffic."
LONG, COLD DAYS
The Arkansas native (he grew up in Bismarck) remembers showing up in Detroit for the first day of filming and being met by ... the cold.
"And being from Arkansas, it's kind of hard to adjust to that, just like overnight," he says. "I showed up, probably, 1 o'clock ... in the morning, and we started filming like 8 o'clock the next morning. So I had to adjust to all that."
Prince filmed for 12 straight days; some days, they didn't stop until 1 or 2 a.m. Having to be back on set around 8 a.m. the same morning, he basically had to take naps -- "naps in the hotel room where everybody's slamming doors at 6 a.m. and waking me up."
But Prince soldiered on. And he's pretty happy with the outcome.
"It's not just a slasher movie where people [are] running around screaming, throwing knives and stuff like that. It's a twister, and it's a thriller and I think it's gonna be really good. I hope it's gonna be really good."
Prince, whose day jobs involve working at a hardwood flooring mill and personal fitness training, saw his acting career begin with a role in a production of the musical "South Pacific" more than a decade ago. Considering himself "not a very good singer," he set out only to get a small part, but was given the meaty role of Lt. Joseph Cable, one of the main characters.
A couple of years later, a casting call went out for a movie that would be filmed in Warren, about 16 and a half miles from Monticello.
"We were coming back from lunch, and my wife said, 'You know, you should go audition, just see what's up.' ... So I said, 'You know what? I'm just gonna go audition, see what happens.'
Again, Prince just wanted a small role. Again, he ended up getting a prominent supporting role.
That's when he began to learn the process of filmmaking and found that he loved it. Seeking an agent, he began his now-former partnership with Yancey Prosser with Little Rock-based The Agency. "Honestly, without Yancey, I wouldn't be where I'm at because even though I'm not with him anymore, he played a major role in me getting to where I'm at right now," Prince says.
Prince found himself cast in the 2016 movie "Poor Mama's Boy," filmed in north Arkansas and focusing on a neglected teenage boy who's suspected in the disappearance of a young girl. "Everything just kind of went on from there."
"An Intrusion" is his biggest project so far. He has it to thank for his production of a short film, "Last Call," released in 2018 and about a recovering alcoholic whose willpower is tested when he takes shelter from the apocalypse in a sports bar.
The movie was written by Taylor Scott, a resident of the U.K. Prince found a director in Fayetteville who cast all Arkansas actors, except for one from Louisiana. "Last Call" went to about 26 festivals and won about 16 awards.
At the same time he was posting about "Last Call" on social media, Holland was looking for someone to play the main character in his film. Someone saw one of Prince's posts and sent his information to Holland "and said 'Hey, this guy kind of fits the description that you're looking for.'
"And he got with me -- sent me the sides," or the dialogue portion of the script. Prince auditioned and got the part around May 2019.
HAD WHAT IT TOOK
"Dustin and I were actually initially talking about him playing a different role," Holland says via email, "but his readings and his charisma just kept making me think, 'This dude just oozes with energy.' And he conveys so much emotion with such subtle movement and tone that I knew he could so effectively play a role that at all times is conveying things differently to the audience and to the characters he interacts with. He was so committed to the role and the set life that it made shooting so much easier than I'm sure we deserved.
"Quite frankly, I hope Dustin is involved in everything else I do from here on out."
Prince says one thing that sold Holland on him was, ironically, his Southern accent.
"In auditions, I'm always trying to tame that. I'm always trying to tame the Southern accent, because you just never know what the character really is about.
"But I've kind of learned from experience, just be yourself ... It is funny because [in the movie] you've got me, who has a Southern accent, and you've got my wife, who has a strong Canadian accent."
Filming of "An Intrusion" began at the end of November 2019, giving Prince roughly six months to really get his lines down.
CHALLENGING ROLE
The role of Sam Hodges has, by far, been Prince's most challenging role. He remembers the last full day of filming, which involved a scene that covered 13 pages of dialogue with another man at a bar.
"I'm already running on fumes," Prince says. "We get up to the scene ... the location, rather. It's a bar setting ... I'm already on my 11th day. I'm already beat ... And I forget everything. I forget my own name. I mean, I have forgotten everything about this scene. I get up there and ... I couldn't get it going. I knew it, but I couldn't get it going."
Prince knew his character would be looking down while drinking, so he asked for the script. "I put it in front of me, and I just go through my lines. I just cheat. I mean, every actor does it at some point ... And once I got going, I really stopped looking at the script. I just needed to get going."
That taught him, Prince says, that "no matter how much you prepare, sometimes you just ain't prepared."
What went through his mind, seeing the finished product?
That it was "better than I expected," Prince says. "When you look at it, it looks like ... they spent 100 times more money on it" then was spent.
"The crew [are the] real heroes of the film, I think."
As are the other cast members, in Prince's eyes.
PRAISE FOR CASTMATES
"We've got some really good people in this film ... They put some actors around me that lifted me up, big time," he says. "I had the best cast to work with."
He specifically cites Gilchrist -- as well as Boyd, who plays Minister Fairfield, the Southern preacher in the film.
"For him to take that role that he did as a Southern Baptist -- and he's Scottish," Prince notes. "He's got a ... strong Scottish accent. And for him to take that role ... There were times when I would close my eyes and listen to him and think, 'This sounded just like my preacher when I was growing up.'"
Prince also praises Hoveland. In one significant outdoor scene between the two, "it was really unbelievable what she did because it was probably about 14 degrees outside, and I'm standing over there, up against the patio railing ... and they had me in this fisherman's sweater, which had holes all in it, right? ... I couldn't feel my soul, it was so cold, but ... she's going through her scene," Prince says. "And she's killing it."
For their daughter in the movie, both Prince and Hoveland "killed it" on camera and off.
Cama, an actress and producer ("Ash and Bone," "Eternal Code") notes in an email that she likes to get comfortable with close castmates so as to turn in an authentic performance. She became so comfortable with Hoveland and Prince, she says, "I really do think of them as a second mom and a second dad to me," she says. "They both took such good care of me on set."
Working with Prince in particular was, Cama says, "a complete blast."
"Literally, we talk all the time to this day," she says. "I am always like 'What's up, Pops?' whenever we talk." The two are already discussing working together on future projects.
"Dustin is very serious about his craft. Every actor has their own thing on how they prefer to work. So, as actors we respect each other's space, but whenever we got a break it was always fun and jokes."
HOPING FOR LIKES
Prince says he looks forward to audiences' reactions to "An Intrusion."
"It's a thriller that doesn't really end the way that you think or want it to," he says, describing it as being on par with the end of the HBO series "The Sopranos" and the film "No Country for Old Men."
"I honestly just want people to enjoy the film and be entertained for a couple hours."