Cristóbal Tapia de Veer did not have an entirely pleasant stay at “The White Lotus.”
Mr. Tapia de Veer, a 51-year-old composer who was born in Chile, joined a video call on Monday from his home in the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, a gong the size of a beach ball visible over his right shoulder. We had planned to discuss his score for Season 3 of the HBO show — specifically, its reworked main title theme, which ignited a minor fury among fans when the season premiered in February.
The conversation went in a very different direction. Mr. Tapia de Veer, who has won three Emmy Awards for his work on “The White Lotus,” said he would not be returning for the show’s fourth season.
He described creative disagreements with the show’s creator and director, Mike White, that began during Season 1. Conversations with producers could be “hysterical,” Mr. Tapia de Veer said, and the show’s creative team repeatedly requested music that was more upbeat and less experimental than the work Mr. Tapia de Veer wanted to produce. (Representatives for HBO declined to comment for this article.)
“I feel like this was, you know, a rock ’n’ roll band story,” Mr. 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, and is always fighting with the guitar player.”
And about that eerie Season 3 theme? Mr. Tapia de Veer loves it, but had hoped the season would include a longer version that builds into the more recognizable melody from the Season 1 and Season 2. Frustrated by its absence, he posted the “uncut ending” to his YouTube channel. (You can listen to it below.)
In the following conversation, which has been edited and condensed, Mr. Tapia de Veer reflected on his tenure with the show.
I want to go back to the moment when the Season 2 theme that you composed for “The White Lotus” became a phenomenon — it had all these remixes, it was playing in clubs. Did that put any pressure on the next season?
Pressure? Not really. The pressure has always been something else in this show. And since we’re talking themes, I wonder if I should tell you for the first theme, how it got to the second — like, the whole “White Lotus” theme thing. You know, I haven’t done any interviews, so I don’t even know where to start with this.
Start wherever you’d like.
It’s kind of weird right now because I announced to the team a few months ago that I was not coming back, that I was leaving. I didn’t tell Mike for various reasons; I wanted to tell him just at the end for the shock and whatever. Except I told the whole editorial team and music editor and producer and all that, but I didn’t think that they were going to tell him. At some point he heard about that.
This is your last season, for sure?
Yeah, yeah. For sure.
Did Mike say anything to you when he found out that you planned to leave?
He says a lot of things, but I can’t really talk about that. There was a French movie, “La Cage Aux Folles.” You know how there’s Albin, which is like the star, and there’s Renato, who is the producer who is always taking care that Albin doesn’t lose his mind about something, because Albin is the diva and Renato is the guy who is trying to make everything work. To me, the show felt very much like that.
Did it feel like that from the beginning?
When I got the script, I wasn’t sure that it was something for me, because it was very well written, but there’s a reality TV kind of vibe going on, and comedic. My stuff in general is the opposite of this, it’s super dark and edgy. But when we had the talk with Mike, I just told him in a joke that I thought we could do some kind of “Hawaiian Hitchcock,” and he really grabbed on that and he started laughing.
I feel like I need to give credit where credit is due, because it’s hard to know how something like “The White Lotus” can actually happen, which is harder than people might imagine. You see it afterward, and it’s a success, but to get there is quite the struggle. I was on the phone with her [Heather Persons, one of the show’s producers] all the time, and she was trying to convince Mike about this theme, because he didn’t want the theme.
He didn’t want the Season 1 theme?
He had a temp score, a song that is more like something you would listen to in Ibiza, in some clubby place with a chill, sexy vibe. And there’s literally no edge to it. It’s a good song; it’s nice music. There’s just absolutely no — whatever you find in the “White Lotus” music, the relationships with the characters — there’s none of that. It’s just nice background music.
I just stuck to what I was doing. And when I was giving versions, it was still the same thing: There were still crazy people and screaming and stuff like that. From there, it became this weird relationship of, How do I pass all this weird music into the show?
What direction were you given for the Season 3 theme, “Enlightenment”?
There was no direction. When I started working on this, I had a collection of Thai gongs that are unrelated to the show. So I started experimenting with that, and then I started looking for someone to play the saw u, which is the Thai violin, which in the theme happens in the beginning.
My mom sent me an accordion at some point, an Italian accordion, and I have no idea how to play it. But I was able to play that. I think it helps the melody, to make it more uplifting, because the melody is very dark.
How did you come up with the melody? Did you consider including that “ooh-loo-loo-loo” melody from Seasons 1 and 2?
The melody is special. It’s something very weird, and is almost impossible to sing unless you’re a singer with a good ear, because the intervals in it are really hard. It has a mystery in it that is kind of magic to me. It’s like there’s some witchery going on.
I have, like, over 20 versions of that theme, with and without the ooh-loo-loo-loos. But of course, in the 1:45 titles that’s allowed, there’s nothing from the other ones. That was kind of a risk, but we never talked about that. I don’t think everybody was really aware of how attached people were to the ooh-loo-loo-loos.
What was it like for you, watching people get so upset that the melody was different? (“I do not understand why you would break something that was perfect,” read one social media post.)
When that came out, I had TMZ calling me, even people from England and from France, because they wanted some kind of statement about the theme. People are furious about the change of the theme, and I thought that was interesting.
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. 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. So I just uploaded that to my YouTube.
Do you think people have warmed up to the theme as it is?
Oh, yeah. At one point, people were like insulting me and sending me horrible things. And then I started seeing these videos: ‘You know what, I used to hate the theme but now I’m kind of dancing to it.’ It’s like they’re transformed. I was really excited about that.
How are you feeling now about the decision to move on?
I mean, it is what it is. You know, I was watching the Emmys, and it’s like, there’s one thing I’m pretty proud of and that is I feel like I never gave up. Maybe I was being unprofessional, and for sure Mike feels that I was always unprofessional to him because I didn’t give him what he wanted. But what I gave him did this, you know — did those Emmys, people going crazy.
People don’t remember, but at first some people were complaining about the music: “I can’t concentrate on the characters, and it’s too much and I’m so stressed out.” But I’m really happy to take those kinds of risks. That is the main thing that I’m most happy about — it was worth all the tension and almost forcing the music into the show, in a way, because I didn’t have that many allies in there.
I treasure that more than something else I did that was just a success, and it works and that’s that, with less struggle. This was a good struggle.
Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times. More about Callie Holtermann
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