Tina Kakadelis
A strange theme that popped up in the 2025 SXSW programming was threesomes. There was the aptly titled The Threesome and there’s also I Really Love My Husband. Written and directed by GG Hawkins, I Really Love My Husband centers on a married couple, Teresa (Madison Lanesey) and Drew (Travis Quentin Young), on their honeymoon in tropical paradise. Things are not as dreamy as they should be for the couple, but the trip turns around when they meet Paz (Arta Gee), their charming rental host. In an attempt to spice up their marriage, Teresa suggests they try to have a threesome with Paz. The person responsible for capturing the beauty of this doomed honeymoon is cinematographer Ryan Thomas.
After the film’s world premiere at the the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, Thomas sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss making the jump from shorts to features, the challenges of shooting on a remote island, and the thrill of premiering in Austin. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Film Obsessive: How did you get involved with I Really Love My Husband and what made you excited about it?
Ryan Thomas: I got involved with this project because I’ve known the director, GG Hawkins, since I was a little kid. I went to elementary, middle, and high school with her. Not only that, but growing up, she was one of my sister’s best friends.
We got reconnected after she did a little bit of a career change from advertising to filmmaking. Also, she moved to LA, that was the other thing. I was like, oh, we could work together. We did a number of short films, little sketches, and things like that together.
She just had an idea to make this film and brought it up with me, and I was like, oh, yeah, you have to do that, that sounds great! And here we are.
This is your first narrative feature as a cinematographer, right?
That’s correct, yeah!
What is that jump like, going from short films to a whole feature-length film?
I would say I’m kind of in a little bit of a unique situation, just because I’ve worked in the film industry for so long in a wide variety of positions. I’ve been in film for over 15 years now, and I’ve done a ton of features and TV as gaffer and electrician in the light department.
I feel like the biggest shift for us is really just that there are more days on the schedule, you know? In a short film, you’re trying to keep it short. With a feature, you have so much more time to breathe. One funny thing was that I knew the length of the script was pretty short. It was probably 74 pages. The only way to maximize your money is by shooting a script that’s literally as short as someone will accept as a feature.
I knew we were going to need more runtime and we were going to need moments from the island and things like that. Whenever I could, I was always just trying to shoot B-roll. There was a moment where I saw these guys transporting palm leaves on a boat, and I’m like, well, I’m never going to see that again, I probably should film it.
There were other things, too, that I shot not thinking they would end up in the movie. There’s a great moment where GG’s stepdad, Peter, is driving our picture boat back to the other island. He’s just returning it, but there’s moonlight on the water, and it was blue hour. I was just like, I bet you if I took a still frame of this, Peter would love to have it. Little do I know, it’s like, oh no, that’s a full 10 seconds in the movie with a full musical cue under it.
That was the biggest shift for me now after seeing the film. I’m just like, oh yeah, those moments are really important.
I did see that you worked a lot in lighting, and I think one of the important aspects of the film is lighting, because it’s supposed to be a tropical beach vacation. Can you talk a little about how much natural light you were able to use and how much of it was studio lights?
I would say a lot of the daytime exteriors we did, that was all natural light. At the same time, we really used scheduling a ton to make sure the sun was going to be in the right position when we were going to shoot. Honestly, and luckily, the beach we shot on after 1:00 or 2:00 would go fully in shade. We could shoot in any direction and it worked.
I tried to talk with GG and ask, which of these moments are really important to you that they stand out? One of them, of course, was the last shot of the movie. How we ended up scheduling that was we shot one direction in the afternoon so you can see the sunset.Then we shot the other direction, looking toward Teresa in the morning so she would be backlit. Luckily, going out to the pier and shooting this one shot didn’t really take us that long. If we had to shoot that with her lit frontal with the sun, it would have taken us so much longer to try and make it look good. We just tried not to fight against the sun and nature as much as possible.
All of the interior stuff, we did use a pretty wide variety of different scale lighting. There are definitely some moments in the montage in the film where Teresa and Drew are arguing throughout the house. Since those were just these single, one-off shots, we definitely looked for moments where we’re like, oh, the natural light here is pretty perfect, we can just set them in the window with the hard sunlight coming in and that’s kind of it.
There’s another one where we put Teresa and Drew in silhouette in the bedroom. Our schedule was so tight. We shot the whole movie in 11 days, roughly. Anything we could do where we could set the camera down and have it look really good, we were always looking for those moments.
It’s interesting when you said that the main difference in jumping from short to feature was that you had more time, but you guys didn’t really have a lot of time at all.
It’s like the movie is more time, but we didn’t have more time to shoot it. I would say I had less time then than I normally would on a short film (laughs).
And then you were dealing with the remoteness of the location too. What was the stress level of putting all your camera equipment on a boat and having to move it around on the open water?
To top it off, too, I had recently purchased the camera myself with a partner, and the waitlist to get another camera was six months to a year. I was like, oh, if anything happens to this camera, I can’t even replace it for a long time. (laughs)
I did personally call the insurance company and specifically went through the plan. Like, if I’m in a boat and the camera falls over, is it covered?
The remoteness was quite the experience. The nearest rental house was a ten-hour drive away and we did have a few issues, of course. At one point in time, I accidentally pulled the cable apart that was for my monitor. I worked in lighting for a long time, so I have experience soldering. We had brought spares, too, but both the spares we brought didn’t work.
I sent somebody to the one hardware store on the island to buy a soldering iron. I managed to fix the cable, and it was fine, but you end up with these moments where you’re like, oh, we have to be extremely resourceful and hope nothing breaks, you know?
One other thing was that I tried to get specific carts that would be good on the beach. It was very expensive to rent them and get them over there. Ultimately, what we found was the most cost effective was buying beach wagons on Amazon. We just had them shipped directly to the house on the island and, when the shoot was over, we gave them to whatever locals wanted them. You really have to come up with some unique solutions and do things you would never consider doing if you were in LA. Out there, though, it just makes a lot more sense.
I saw on the film’s Instagram that there was a shot you wanted to do, but you didn’t have the right dolly to do it. With all these limitations, do you feel like it really pushed you to a new creative level you might not have gotten to if you were on a studio lot in L.A.?
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like the films I’ve shot that have turned out the best are never the ones that have the most resources. I’ve heard great art comes from great limitations, you know? You’re forced to do these things that are a little funny in the moment, but you look back and you’re like, oh, that was actually great. We would have never thought to do this if we’d had all the equipment in the world.
Another little example was when I tried so hard to get a hazer or something to create some sort of hazy atmosphere. What ended up working best was in this bar scene, we had a few background actors who, just on their own, started smoking. I was like, how many cigarettes do you have and can you smoke for the rest of the scene? They’re like, oh yeah, I could do that for sure. And it’s like, with all the tools, I would have never have been like, please smoke, but in this instance it was great.
You got to go to SXSW, right? What was that experience like?
It was really incredible! We sold out our first screening. Just to have so many people who wanted to see our film and come up to us afterwards to say they loved it and were emotionally affected by it…it feels really good. The first screening I stood in the aisle and watched from there because I was just like, there’s too many people who want to see our movie. Who am I to stop them?
Thank you so much, Ryan! I really enjoyed the film and it looked so beautiful. Made me want to go on an island trip, even though they have a horrible vacation. (laughs)
You got to go to Bocas del Toro. At one point, yeah, we went to a bar that’s floating in the middle of the ocean. It’s an incredible place. Everywhere you go, there’s a thing that you’re like, well, I’ve never seen that before. (laughs)
