“The White Lotus” creator Mike White is clapping back — and not holding back — at his HBO hit’s Emmy-winning composer, Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, who announced he was exiting the series last week.
In a candid SiriusXM interview with Howard Stern Tuesday, two days after “The White Lotus” April 6 Season 3 finale, White expressed confusion and hurt over Tapia de Veer’s comments to The New York Times, detailing what he called creative clashes with White and announcing he had quit the series.
“I honestly don’t know what happened,” White told Stern, calling Tapia da Veer’s sole April 2 interview a “PR campaign” that landed “three days before the finale. It was kind of of a bitch move.”
“I don’t think he respected me. He basically wants people to know that he’s edgy and dark and I’m, I don’t know, like I watch reality TV,” said White, a former “Survivor” and “Amazing Race” contestant. “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. 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 I guess he didn’t respect me. I knew he wasn’t a team player and that he wanted to do it his way.”
White said the process worked well with Tapia de Veer for the first two “White Lotus” seasons. “But in the third season, he had won Emmys and his song had gone viral. He just did not want to go through the process anymore,” said White. “He’d have a contemptuous smirk on his face when dealing with me. Like I was just a chimp or something.”
Tapia de Veer, who won three Emmys for the show’s earworm theme, told the Times that he had to “force” his music into “The White Lotus,” claiming he had few allies on the production and labeling the process “a good struggle.”
“I feel like this was, you know, a rock ’n’ roll band story,” Tapia de Veer said. “I was like, OK, this is like a rock band I’ve been in before where the guitar player doesn’t understand the singer at all.”
Kim Neundorf, a representative for Tapia de Veer, declined to comment to USA TODAY about White’s interview.
White said that he had not chosen a new location for Season 4 (but he’s traveling to Colombia to get out of Los Angeles). He told Stern that, after breaking viewership records in Season 3, he was renegotiating his HBO deal for Season 4.
When Stern pressed for specifics for the deal, White responded in a way that reflected “The White Lotus” main theme. “At a certain point with money, (one wonders) is this going to make me worse?” said White. “Is having more money just going to make me more dysfunctional?”
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