The White Lotus creator Mike White has hit out at Emmy-winning composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s abrupt departure from the show, calling the announcement “kinda a b**** move.”
Last week, de Veer revealed that he is leaving the hit HBO show, citing long-standing friction with writer and director White.
In an interview with The New York Times, Tapia de Veer, 51, announced that he would not return for the show’s fourth season and said of White: “We already had our last fight forever.”
Speaking on The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday, White, 54, responded to de Veer’s comments by saying: “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.
“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. 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. I was thrown that he would go to The New York Times to s*** on me and the show three days before the finale. It was kinda a b**** move.”
Tapia de Veer composed the much-loved scores for the first and second seasons of the black comedy, which earned him two Primetime Emmy awards.
However, following a lukewarm response to the theme for season three, Tapia de Veer said he would not return.
He told The New York Times: “When [the season three theme] 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.”
The composer revealed that he had made a longer version of the song, which contained nods to the previous scores that could have been used in the opening credits.
When the production team approved of this idea, he revealed that: “Mike [White] cut that — he wasn’t happy about that.” He eventually chose to release the full version of the song, called “Enlightenment,” on YouTube.
Tapia de Veer also claimed that conversations with the show’s producers could be “hysterical” and that they repeatedly asked for music that was more experimental than what he wanted to produce.
“I feel like this was, you know, a rock ’n’ roll band story,” he 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.”
Tapia de Veer claimed that his conflicts with White dated back to the first season when there were tensions over the music despite its award’s success.
“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,” he said in the interview.
Ultimately, Tapia de Veer said 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”.
In a three-star review of the recent finale, The Independent’s Adam White argued that the show’s third season “was The White Lotus at its most un-fun.”
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