Mike White, creator of The White Lotus, responded to the show’s composer, Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, leaving the show by calling it a “bitch move.”
White recently appeared on the Howard Stern Show where he opened up about how he felt regarding the situation.
“I honestly don’t know what happened, except now I’m reading his interviews because he decides to do some PR campaign about him leaving the show,” White said. “I don’t think he respected me. He wants people to know that he’s edgy and dark and I’m, I don’t know, like I watch reality TV. We never really even fought. He says we feuded.”
“I don’t think I ever had a fight with him — except for maybe some emails,” White continued. “It was basically me giving him notes. I don’t think he liked to go through the process of getting notes from me, or wanting revisions, because he didn’t respect me. I knew he wasn’t a team player and that he wanted to do it his way.”
White ended his tirade with a harsh jab at him.
“I was thrown that he would go to The New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale,” added White. “It was kind of a bitch move.”
Later, White elaborated a bit more on his frayed relationship with Tapia de Veer, alleging that the composer “didn’t want to go throughout the process with me’ and “didn’t want to go to sessions” during the production of the third season.
“He would always look at me with this contemptuous smirk on his face like he thought I was a chimp or something,” said White. "He’s definitely making a big deal out of a creative difference of opinion.”
White’s verbal lashing comes days after Tapia de Veer told the New York Times that he and White didn’t agree on the theme song to The White Lotus. White preferred for the music to lose its traditional “ooh-loo-loo-loos” that became the composer’s signature for the show’s first two seasons. Tapia de Veer then said that White wanted something different for season 3: "background music… a song that is more like something you would listen to in Ibiza, in some clubby place with a chill, sexy vibe.”
“I texted the producer and I told him that it would be great to, at some point, give them the longer version with the ooh-loo-loo-loos, because people will explode if they realize that it was going there anyway,” Tapia de Veer explained. “He thought it was a good idea. But then Mike cut that — he wasn’t happy about that. I mean, at that point, we already had our last fight forever, I think. So he was just saying no to anything.”
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