What is a 'Hero Prop'—And Why is it So Important For Production Designers?

We all love a good honeymoon phase, but what happens when the very honeymoon itself is ground zero for a budding marriage to unravel? Hopefully, you've never gone through such a tumultuous circumstance—talk about a bummer. But, say you have? Hey. It's okay. Take solace that this very idea is explored in GG Hawkin's SXSW-premiere I Really Love My Husband.

Made delicately in true, hard-working independent fashion, I Really Love My Husband is something of an anti-Rom Com laced with White Lotus-level relationship commentary, sprinkled with a little bit of Challengers energy for good measure. Not pigeonhole Hawkins' vision, however—I Really Love My Husband is a unique analysis of young, millennial relationships all on its own.

Set in beautiful Boca Del Toro, our titular husband Drew (Travis Quentin Young), and his wife, who really loves him, Tersa (Madison Lanesey), stay in a cozy beachside Airbnb for their potentially doomed honeymoon. Once you get a chance to watch the film, you might be thinking—how did they get it to look so good? Enter production designer Jesse Chaffin. Chaffin took the reins to set dress the central location, as well as design intricate props that give the characters and narrative subtle, nuanced depth.

Below, we chat with Chaffin about bringing I Really Love My Husband to life, as well as the insider craft of perfecting the film's several hero props. Enjoy!

Editor's note: The following interview is edited for length and clarity.

How to Production Design a Perfect Honeymoon Getaway

"The location was in a little tiny area called Boca del Toro, Panama. It's a chain of islands almost to Costa Rica, very north of Panama. My approach to that—I mean, I've known GG for a little bit, and my husband, Ryan, is the DP on this feature, so my approach was a little bit different with [I Really Love My Husband]. Also, they weren't going to have a production designer at all until pretty late. I was brought on late in the process, I think maybe a month before we left. So things were a little bit established. It was an amazing location that already existed, but not a ton of money to work with, and there was the challenge of traveling with everything [to Boca del Toro]. It was super difficult to ship anything, and a little bit risky. So I chose not to ship anything ahead of time and brought everything with me.

So with that, I was a little bit limited in what I could do. I wanted to add color wherever I could and add landing areas of color. I also wanted to bring in a little bit more Indigenous art that we were seeing in our research that was these really cool, almost neon colors, like very bright fuchsia and lime greens and oranges, yellows, and things like that.

So that's where I focused my energy, doing that and trying to get as much stuff as I could for free. I did get all of our art for free, which was awesome."

Nailing the Pivotal Hero Props 

"A Hero prop is usually scripted. It's something that you're really going to see on camera that's important to the story—so the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon, that's the hero prop of the movie. Indiana Jones's whip would be a hero prop, and the idle thing that he gets—I don't even know that part, where he's switching the bag of sand—things like that, that are really heavily featured on camera are hero props. There are other things that are [minor] props—like a coffee cup that someone is casually drinking from, or their satchel or whatever—that you're probably not going to be having discussions at length about.

I would say the biggest hero prop [in I Really Love My Husband] is these sunglasses. There's a drug trip sequence that happens, and at the end of it, the characters all sit down and paint eyeballs on their sunglasses, and sit at the end of the dock. GG knew early on that she wanted these to be the key art for the film, so they were really important. We spent a pretty long time revisiting what the eyes were going to look like. I did a lot of sketches, and there was a lot of back and forth on them to be really specific with the color. Casting happened a little late too, so we were like, okay, we better lock this guy in so I could try these sunglasses on him. That ended up being a really fun process because GG had a really clear idea of what she wanted for them.

[Some other examples were] a lot of graphic design. At the very beginning of the film, there's a keto bar that causes some trouble, so I couldn't reach out to a brand and try to use their keto bar. We needed some pretty specific things to happen with it, so I ended up creating the packaging and the label for it.

I had to go around town and buy all these different keto bars and look at what they looked like and be like, okay, we like the look of this bar, the shape of this bar. So it was a lot of cutting them into the right shape and fitting them in the packaging, but it turned out really good. I was pretty proud of that."

Overcoming Production Challenges in Style 

"I don't think I've ever—especially not for a feature—done anything that you can't location scout ahead of time for, so that was pretty interesting. We had a good amount of pictures, and we had someone in Panama that I could text and ask for measurements for things. There were some [particular wants], like we wanted to get new cushions made for a bench seating and things like that. Usually, with stuff like that, I really like to be the one measuring it myself and just really make sure I have the information. Putting that trust out there was tough, and getting there and realizing, oh, I never would've thought there was a really big piece of art in the living room. It wasn't just something I could swap out.

There were a couple of little things that we had to swap out last minute. I had this giant five-foot-by-three-foot structure, for instance. I ended up getting a bunch of these cool Indigenous art there, little tapestries—they're called a Mola, and they're different animals and things like that. It ended up being way cooler than what I was going to do before."

Jessie Chaffin's Advice to Aspiring Production Designers 

"I got my start doing student films, and I really think that is the way to do it, the way to meet people. I still talk to a lot of the friends that I made doing that. While I don't necessarily recommend going to film school, as is the name of your website—I didn't. And I think my theater background ended up helping me a lot. I think there are a few film schools that have a really good production design program, but I think you're going to have much better luck with a scenery design for a theater program than you will with a film program. But then doing that and working with the cinema department students, I think that was the path I took, and I think it was pretty darn good."