SYTYCD Alum Kent Boyd and Rose Marziale Tells Us What It Took To Make “It Remains”

On Wednesday June 4th, the fruits of another exciting Kickstarter crop will be ready for harvesting. Kent Boyd, runner up on So You Think You Can Dance‘s 7th season, and his talented and charming co-star Rose Marziale, are holding their collective breaths and waiting for the verdict from the viewers. Will their indie film about a complex love story, aptly entitled “It Remains“, satisfy the masses who donated money to make it happen? That’s the question on everyone’s minds, including mine, as sat down with Kent and Rose for a interview to find out a little bit more about them and their project.

The Hudsucker: The first thing I want to know is what is the plot of the movie? I guess the trailer is deliberately vague, but how much can you tell me without giving away the ending?

Rose Marziale: We left a lot of the film up for interpretation. We wanted it to be a universal love story, but still personal to people. We wanted to give people an outline of a story and then they can project their story onto it. Even on IMDb, Kent’s character’s name is listed as “me” and my character’s is name is “you”. So it’s like it is everyone’s story. So it basically tells the story of love, we meet, we fall in love, fall out of love. The title “It Remains” comes from the fact that what happens after that always remains with you no matter what and makes you who you are as a person.

Kent Boyd: And a quote that really inspired the movie was “better to have loved and lost than to never loved at all” and that’s something we kept throughout the story-line and like Rose was saying, we were toying with the idea of filling the glass a little bit more than half full and let the audience pour in the rest of their stories. Our main objective was that after people had left, to say “oh yeah, there was a relationship I was in that didn’t work out but I’m so glad that I went through it even though, at that time, it was so hard for me to get through.” That’s basically what we want to come across. Those feelings that sometimes you have to go through things that are difficult to find out who you are, what you want and what you need. We did that with the three different languages of music, dancing and acting.

The Hudsucker: Definitely, especially with music, I think a good album does that. As a listener, you relate to the song because the artist isn’t telling you what to think. You think things as you listen to the music.

Boyd: Yeah, and we think our viewers, and the people that will understand it and watch it have their own mind and that they’re creative and they have lived some life. We have faith in them that they can interpret it any way they want.

Marziale: And we want people to talk about it too. We want it to be the type of movie where you leave it and then you talk about it with your friends.

Boyd: Right and someone could be like “oh, I didn’t really like that” or “I didn’t really understand that” and another person is like “No, I totally understood that”. I mean, that’s what I love when I go to see a movie with Rose or whoever and I’m like “Wow, I didn’t really like that” and she’s like “Well that was my favourite part” and so that’s the thing we wanted to bring to it.

Marziale: We wanted to start a conversation

The Hudsucker: Yeah, especially with a Kickstarter because the whole point is to please the people who gave you the “start”, right? Probably the best way to do that is to put it in their hands and let them think what they want to think.

Marziale: That’s a good point.

The Hudsucker: Well, now that we’ve talked about Kickstarter. Was it nerve-wracking doing it on Kickstarter?

Boyd: That’s a great question to ask. Kickstarter was crazy, we put it up and we really weren’t expecting much. We were like “let’s do it for three thousand dollars” and I was the one who got a little crazy and put twelve thousand. I don’t think Rose knew or she was like “put eleven thousand”.

Marziale: I wanted to put nine thousand.

Boyd: Yeah, I was like “no, I’m going for twelve”. We were debating which kind of crowd-funder we wanted to use because there’s different tax rewrites and all this kind of stuff and with IndieGoGo, even if you don’t make your goal you can still get the money. But we were like “no, we want Kickstarter” because they take out less of a percentage at the end and we think that the most people know about them. So we put it up and we would check it every day.

Marziale: We were obsessed.

Boyd: It was like one of those geopets that you have to feed everyday and watch it grow. And when we didn’t get any money, I had an awful day, like it was just a bad day for me. And the minute we got e-mails about getting money, we were like “it’s okay, it’s a good day”. It was interesting to see that. It was out of our hands and so many people were sharing it and spread it and we had to do a lot of “please share this” which is annoying sometimes, but you have to do it. But, when it finished and we reached our goal, we were so relieved.

Marziale: We got almost double our goal. Which was crazy.

Boyd: And what did you say? You knew some of the statistics about it.

Marziale: Oh yeah, at the time it was the second most funded dance Kickstarter ever.

Boyd: Under Stacey Tookey’s Still Motion, that’s going on right now.

Marziale: And it’s still one of the Top 20.

Boyd: But we were like “we have to hit this”, but it was cool. We were very humbled. We spent a lot of time just trying to remember that it was out of our hands which was kind of comforting because it was like if we’re supposed to do this, we will and if we’re not we won’t or we’ll tone it down and we won’t do it with that big of a budget. But the minute we got double our budget, it was one of the scariest things. It was a blessing and a curse, we were like “oh God, this is real”.

Marziale: Yeah, we didn’t know the scale of it, but when we got double, we knew we had to be legitimate about it and make it big.

Boyd: Which was really scary because I feel like when we had that money, more responsibility came and more decisions. Personally I don’t think I was ready for it. A lot of things shifted in the project. We kind of lost some people and gained some people and it was a story of growth. But I thought it was really awesome to see that but immediately we had to figure out some stuff. You have to do this, you have to lose this, you have to gain this and it tore more apart. Just going through the process of realizing that we had that much money and figuring out our team from that. We could spend more money on a team and production and that kind of stuff, but you’re giving two kids that much money to make a movie, this a lot of responsibility. I cannot screw this up.

The Hudsucker: Yeah, it kind of forces you to be really smart with it. Like with the Veronica Mars Kickstarter, the writer Rob Thomas, was saying that when they were filming a scene where they crash a car into something, they only had enough money to do it once so they had to get it right, which is something you wouldn’t normally consider when filming a movie.

Marziale: Yeah, it’s different than when you make any kind of art and you’re like “I don’t know who’s going to see this” or “I don’t know where it’s going to go” but we know the names of the people who will see it.

Boyd: It’s not just us, there’s a whole team behind us. My main concern was I want to make them proud, I want to do something good, I don’t want to disappoint anybody.

The Hudsucker: Well I’m going to ask you more about that later actually, but I have a fan question from Jenn (dontyoudarechange on tumblr). She wants to know how long it took to make the movie?

Boyd: Well that’s a loaded question. Pre-production took a while. [To Rose] How long do you thing that took?

Marziale: Well we had the idea in September 2012, we did the Kickstarter in November 2012. We start filming in March 2013. It’s so funny because we put so much into everything, but filming was 3 days long.

The Hudsucker: That’s so crazy.

Boyd: It was, but from that point, after we got funded, we had to assemble the team, we had to find the director, we had to find the producer, all the lighting, the locations and scouted and once that was all aligned. I mean, it’s a short film, it’s ten minutes long, so it took three days to shoot.

Marziale: After that there’s post-production too. We finished that by the Summer of 2013 because it’s such an involved film, even though it’s a short one. We had the dancing aspect, the music, the score and a composer who was amazing.

Boyd: Yeah, it’s all original soundtrack. It’s beautiful.

Marziale: It’s insane, his name is Duncan Blickenstaff.

Boyd: His credits come from Life of Pi.

Marziale: Our music mixer, Noguchi, was insanely talented too.

Boyd: Yeah, we just got really lucky in the music department.

Marziale: It was amazing. We were involved in every single aspect of it which was a huge learning experience. Basically we produced a film and we learned from the beginning. That’s why it took so long pre-production wise.

Boyd: It was two people that were in charge of it.

Marziale: And we found a great team and we found a producer who actually is a producer professionally and he worked with us and he was amazing.

Boyd: But we were calling all the shots. We were like, “We don’t like this” or “we do like this” or “what do you think about this”.

Marziale: Which was intimidating. Because of the funding, we ended up getting people that we otherwise would not have been able to work with so it was intimidating, at least for me, to tell Duncan, the composer who is so insanely talented. He’s a genius. And then he would send us something and we would have critique and it wasn’t like it was bad, but it was more like “no more like this” and it was intimidating to tell someone that you respect so much and that you look up to and has so much more experience to change what they’re doing.

Boyd: But that’s what they’re used to.

Marziale: It really became everyone’s passion project, everyone who worked on it was so enthusiastic and loved the idea and gave it everything, which was awesome.

The Hudsucker: It’s almost like cooking a meal. It takes you hours to go and buy the groceries and another hour to prepare it all and then in a few minutes, you’re done eating. But I guess the rewarding aspect is how will people react to it.

Marziale: Yeah, good analogy.

The Hudsucker: So that kind of lends itself to my other question, which is how was it working on a project that you had such a strong hand in versus someone else’s project?

Boyd: When you have a project that you’re involved in every decision, you know more about it. You’re far more invested or, it’s just a different investment. You’re not just invested in your character, you’re invested in the camera and the catering, making sure everyone is being taken care of. It’s just a bigger and grander thing versus coming into a project that you love and you’re playing a part. You have less to worry about, you don’t have to worry about everyone’s time, you just go in there and do your job. It’s more contained versus “It Remains”, where we had to keep our eyes open for every possible thing and being able to answer anything and then, when camera rolled, you had to forget all of that and you had to be in character and make sure you were telling the story that you wanted to tell. Both are awesome and I want to continue to do both because I love them both. Like I love coming into a project that someone else is doing and being told what to do, but I also like telling other people what to do. [both laugh]

The Hudsucker: It sounds so exhausting.

Marziale: It is, I aged like ten years while making the movie. It’s also a very vulnerable place to be when it’s yours.

Boyd: Yeah, when it’s your project, everyone knows who you. It’s like when you choreograph versus when you just come in to dance. When you choreograph, they know it’s your name, your ideas, your concept and you think about whether people are judging you or “is this not good?” versus you coming in and doing a Travis Wall number, which is beautiful and awesome, but it’s more of his project and you’re just a dancer versus it being your project.

The Hudsucker: Now, do you think that made it easy to convey the emotions in the movie? Knowing how much was at stake?

Boyd: For sure and that’s why we wanted to do this. Before we had even thought of an idea or I had even talked to Rose, I just wanted to make something. I feel like I can only compare my acting with dance. As I started to take dance more seriously, I wanted to choreograph and then I started to understand formations and choreography better and what it is to create an image and to be a part of that because I was the creator and I wanted to make my vision come true the way that I saw it. I became so much more aware and then with acting, I was in class and I was doing things and I was like “wow, I want to take this more seriously. How do I understand this craft better? Well, let’s make a movie. Let’s be the actual visionary. Let me understand and appreciate every single job that’s involved in a movie because there’s so much behind the scenes.” I was like, “I want to learn and I want to be better and I want to do this” and how else would I learn other than by just getting my feet wet and starting a project. It just became bigger than I thought.

Marziale: By the time we actually filmed it, I remember I was with Kent and I was like “oh shoot, we forgot to think about the characters” and Kent was like, “We know what the characters are! We’ve been doing this for months now, we don’t need to talk about the acting aspect of it” and I was like, “Oh yeah”. By the time it came to the acting part, we were already ready for that.

The Hudsucker: It’s almost like because you’re dealing with the little pieces and the big picture you don’t see them separately.

Marziale: Right. It’s very hard to remove yourself. It’s a real skill to be so close to something and be able to remove yourself from it. It’s really hard.

Boyd: Someone said something to me that was so great. It’s that you’d rather send something out into the world that’s not perfect, versus something that is perfect, so that you can take the feedback versus being so attached to something and you hear the criticisms of it and it becomes personal. It’s better to already have that detachment and then you can release it and let it take it’s own shape. Which is what we were doing. We really had no ego, we didn’t know what we were doing, we just wanted to create. I think we had the right intentions to create something awesome. We recognized that it could be bad, but we were like “let’s go, let’s just try”.

The Hudsucker: You almost don’t want to set you expectations too high because when someone doesn’t like it the same way you do, you take it personally.

Boyd: Right, it’s like dating. You can’t go into a relationship and be like “I expect this person to fall in love with me and we’re going to get married” because the minute you do that, the relationship ends. You just have to go into the relationship being like “Wow this is cool, I think I might like you. Maybe you’ll like me. Let’s just have fun.”

The Hudsucker: Definitely, I think if you over think anything you can ruin it. So Kent already told me why he got into acting, why did you get into acting Rose?

Marziale: I always performed. I did musicals, I did singing, dancing and acting and I high school I got really focused on dancing but I just kept getting injured and my mom was like “You’re going to hurt yourself, your body can’t handle it.” Your body is in for a lot if you’re going to be a dancer and sometimes your body just isn’t cut out for it, like me. [laughs] There’s a quote that’s like “if you can imagine yourself doing something else, go do that other thing” because it’s hard to be an actor or a singer or a dancer and if you can possibly picture yourself doing something else, you’ll be much happier doing that other thing. So I was like “I can picture myself acting” so I’ll pursue acting and then immediately after high school and I had hip surgery and I moved to Vancouver and went to film school for acting and then I moved out here to California.

The Hudsucker: So, how was doing the movie with each other? There are some pretty intense scenes in there. Did your relationship with each other ever get in the way?

Boyd: I was professional and awesome.

Marziale: [laughs]

The Hudsucker: Somehow I don’t believe that…

Marziale: Thank you!

Boyd: Are you kidding me? Please. I mean with dancing, I was played the lover of someone so I was like you’re like my sister and I was like “Rose, we’re going to have to kiss and stuff” and Rose was like, “I’m so nervous” and she was like, “I need to practice” and I was like “No, you don’t. You’re fine.

Marziale: I did, I needed to practice. That was the worst part. But first of all, you are right. Kent has problems. The main issue was when he was grouchy and we’d be filming a scene and holding hands and as soon as they’d call cut, he’d throw my hand down.

Boyd: It doesn’t matter! In the scene, when they said “action”, I was ready to go and when he said “cut”, I was done.

Marziale: In the takes, it was never an issue. I don’t think we had anything that we filmed that we weren’t fully in character. It was the beforehand. Mostly the kissing thing, it was just so weird. So yes, I was the one who said “We need to practice” and I still maintain that you needed to practice too because kissing on camera is different that kissing in real life.

Boyd: It is, but we could have figured that out.

Marziale: We could not have figured that out because we practiced kissing and we filmed it to watch it back on his computer and we watched it back and we were like “oh no, this is awful”.

Boyd: It was like soft-core porn.

Marziale: And if we hadn’t practiced we wouldn’t have known that and every single kiss in the movie would have been disgusting.

Boyd: Yeah, I mean we did have to make sure it read right to the audience and it was appropriate to the arc of the story and what we’re trying to create. It was a challenge.

The Hudsucker: There’s also an underwater scene? How difficult was that?

Marziale: I think that was the most difficult. One of our friends has a mansion and he let us film there for free. It was amazing. There’s actually this reality show about make up called “Face Off” and they live in his mansion.

Boyd: Yeah, so he has a saltwater pool and they spent an hour setting up all this light and rigging and it’s freezing.

Marziale: This is the last shot of the night so it was late and in early March so it was cold.

Boyd: So we’re in the pool and we’re trying to get this shot and our director Andrew Morgan, who has huge hair and no body fat, and he’s holding the camera and he’s shivering and the owner of the house is coming over with hot water and pouring it on us and Rose doesn’t know how to swim. She knows how to float.

Marziale: I obviously know how to swim. I just can’t sink, I don’t know why.

Boyd: I got so mad. I was like “Get your head underwater! Let’s go!”

Marziale: I can’t hold my breath underwater, I just assumed I would be able to because everyone can hold their breath underwater.

Boyd: Instead of focusing on the kiss she should have been in swim lessons.

Marziale: Yeah, that’s actually true. I didn’t think about it. That was really hard, but what’s really funny is we tried filming in the freezing cold pool for probably a good twenty or thirty minutes. It was hard, but then we were like “Wait, can we film in the hot tub? Is that possible?” because he had a deep hot tub, so we were like “Why didn’t we think of that before?” so then the shot that we used, all the best shots were in the hot tub. We just used the lighting in the hot tub instead of this big rig they had set up, but it worked luckily.

The Hudsucker: Also, you’ve mentioned that there’s dance in the movie. How was that to film because it’s totally different than dancing on stage, right?

Boyd: Yeah, it was different. Filming dance is always a challenge. So You Think You Can Dance has eleven years on it and they’ve figured out the angles to showcase and to make the angles and the lines look good but you can film dance and it can look really bad. So working with Andrew Morgan was really interesting.

Marziale: Yeah, they had never filmed dance before and filming dance is a whole different animal and it’s not a super common thing to do.

Boyd: Yeah, I think it’s becoming more current today. We didn’t focus so much on the moves, more on the intention and the emotion behind them. There’s three different pieces and we based them off the emotions behind them and one of my friends, Jessica Keller, who was in Teen Beach Musical with me and we worked on some intentional improvs to incorporate and invoke the emotions in the three different pieces, so that’s the main focus. But it was interesting after to see the edits and picking the things to use. Andrew showed us a few of the edits and I was like “No, we can’t use that”. Andrew thought it looked great and I was like “No, that’s not great. That is not good.” But I feel like everyone is becoming more knowledgeable about what makes good dancing because it’s a hard art to understand like with singing, you can understand if it sounds good or bad, with acting, if you feel something or if you believe it, it’s good, but with dance, so many people can be fooled by bad dancing. Not enough people are going to the ballet and turning on this or watching that and so, it’s hard art because you really do have to be a master at it and understand it, it’s not just something that come natural. You have to actually work at it.

The Hudsucker: But I think that’s the great thing about it, that there is disagreement. I mean, the same is true with music and art. One person can think it’s terrible and another person can think it changed their life.

Boyd: Right and that is what art is: subjective. And that’s what we want our film to be. We want people to hate it and we want people to love it and we want people to care and not care about it. We want it all.

The Hudsucker: Speaking of So You Think You Can Dance, any plans to be an all-star again?

Boyd: I don’t know, I don’t know how they do it. They do it very last minute and it also depends on who they cast in their Top 20 and they don’t know who that is yet. I wasn’t on the last two seasons but we’ll see, you never know. I don’t have an answer for that. Just get a hashtag #KentAsAnAllStar and keep tweeting Nigel Lythgoe (@dizzyfeet)

The Hudsucker: We just have to get some girls who can do some amazing contemporary pieces with you.

Boyd: Right, but I wouldn’t even be opposed to doing broadway or jazz. That’s some of my favourite stuff, like some of the stuff I did with Neil Haskell. Finding a girl or finding another guy to do a great broadway number with would be so fun. But, Teen Beach Musical 2 is happening so maybe I’ll be over in Puerto Rico filming that and then I won’t be available.

The Hudsucker: That’s true and I think the more recent seasons have been robbing us of the same versatility. We’ve had a lot of contemporary and jazz and I get that it’s because that’s what the audience responds to, as opposed to ballroom or krump, but I think the winner should always be the most versatile person.

Boyd: I think the thing is too that we should be spending more time with the contestants. They have to have a great personality and they have to start breeding stars. They have breed people that have minds and that are creative and that have something to go along with them because then you’re not only attached to the dancing, you’re attached to the person and you become a fan of them. That’s what I really want So You Think You Can Dance to focus on. Luckily on my season, I had 11 contestants, so there was a lot of time to play around with the packages beforehand or have funny little interviews or let us talk and then people got to see who we were and that’s what’s difficult about the show now. There are twenty contestants and they’re sharing time with the all-stars, that people already know and I’m like “no, let’s get to know these people and their families and their stories” because they’ll go straight to the sad, sentimental stories which is great, but let’s get to their personalities, let’s learn about them and get attached to them and then we’ll be more curious about their dancing and it will mean more to us and then after the show, hopefully they have awesome careers and So You Think You Can Dance will nourish that as well.

The Hudsucker: I think that was so great about your season. Because of the smaller cast, we got 11 people who could feasibly win and that’s what I want. I want people that with the right connection to the audience and the right routines, all have a shot at winning.

Boyd: Right and the smaller cast allowed us to do more styles because it’s also twenty contestants all on one day, which is what Fox has given the show. But, it’s been around for eleven seasons and it’s done so much for dance. I think people forget that it was the first dance show. It brought dance into homes. Contemporary wasn’t even a thing.

The Hudsucker: My other question is, last season they had the night where the all-stars were also the choreographers and then they danced with the contestants. Would you do that?

Boyd: Oh yeah, totally. I’d love to do that.

The Hudsucker: Yeah, because I think we got some amazing routines out of that. Like Mark Kanemura’s jazz with Jenna and Allison Holker’s contemporary with Fik-Shun, who knew she had that in her? But I think, if they’re going to draw the focus onto the all-stars for a minute, that’s the way to do it.

Boyd: Right and I think Dancing With The Stars really has figured that out by making their dancers almost as big as the stars. You know their faces, you know who they are. Not only are you rooting for the stars, you’re rooting for Derek Hough.

Marziale: And Chelsie Hightower!

Boyd: Right!

The Hudsucker: True, but the one thing I don’t like about Dancing With The Stars is that sometimes it seems like the dancer is getting the votes, not the star. But I think So You Think You Can Dance does a really good job of making sure that the contestant is getting the votes and not the all-star. So no matter who you dance with, it comes down to your performance.

Boyd: Right, and I think rotating the all-stars helps that. No one has Allison Holker the whole journey. They have Allison, Courtney, Lauren and then a guy.

The Hudsucker: True and I think, even though Allison and Twitch are so well loved, dancing with them isn’t going to guarantee you safety, you really have to own the style and that’s what so great about the show.

Boyd: For sure.

The Hudsucker: Another question, since you already kind of mentioned it. What other projects do you have on horizon?

Boyd: Well, we have this and then Teen Beach Musical 2. I know they’ve green lit that but I don’t know much about it yet but I know that it’s a go. We’ll see what happens. The first one was a huge success, so keep your eyes peeled for that and I’ll let you know.

The Hudsucker: Oh, I’m sure it will be all over Twitter.

Marziale: Oh yeah. I’m going to New York this month with my improv comedy team to perform at UCB there. It’s this big training centre and performance place, Amy Poehler founded it. I’m really excited about that.

The Hudsucker: So is improv nerve-wracking? Because I feel like it would be. Anything could go wrong.

Marziale: Exactly. I mean, It’s with a team, but it’s still the most terrifying thing in the entire world. While you’re doing a show, you have no idea if it’s good or not. It’s really scary, but that’s why I do it. It forces you to be bold and working with a team means you get to collaborate with people. You’re basically writing a show live and acting it out at the same time. You have to be so present.

The Hudsucker: My last question: So the movie is playing on June the 4th at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. How can people who aren’t in LA see it?

Boyd: Right, that’s the tricky thing. I just went back home to Ohio for a week because my sister graduated high school and everyone was like “How can we see it?” but because we’re going down the route of film festivals, they’re kind of touchy on the subject and want the film to premiere there so by releasing it online right away, we’d lose some of the credibility of the film. So when we finish out our film festival run and we’re done submitting it, then we’ll let everyone know when we’re going to post it online for everyone that has donated. We don’t really know that time limit yet, but soon. Obviously that’s the end goal, to put it online and let everyone see it.

The Hudsucker: Awesome, well I think that’s it guys. Thank you so much for a great interview! I look forward to seeing it!

Watch the trailer for It Remains here.

To follow Kent, Rose & It Remains on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram:

It Remains: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
Kent Boyd: Twitter | Instagram
Rose Marziale: Twitter | Instagram

The film screens Wednesday June 4th at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatre in Hollywood, California. To get tickets, visit their official site.