White Lotus creator Mike White has responded to claims by the show’s composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer that the two men have “had our last fight” and that he’s quitting the show.
Tapia de Veer came out swinging in an interview with the New York Times, claiming that he and White have been at loggerheads since the start of the show, which has just completed its third season. He also claimed that the writer/director blocked the release of the full version of his most recent main title theme, the edited version of which has received a lukewarm response from fans. This led him to upload it himself to his own YouTube channel.
“I feel like this was, you know, a rock ’n’ roll band story,” said Tapia de Veer. “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.”
A seemingly bemused White has now had his say on the Howard Stern Show. “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,” he said. “I just 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.”
White went on to say that he doesn’t recognise the way that Tapia de Veer characterised their working relationship: “We never really even fought. He says we feuded. I don’t think I ever had a fight with him - except maybe some emails.”
Nevertheless, Tapia de Veer’s decision to go public seems to have caught White off-guard. “I knew he was not, like, a team player and that he wanted to do it his way,” he says, before adding that “I was thrown that he would go to the New York Times to shit on me and the show three days before the finale. It was kind of a bitch move.”
While The White Lotus seems set to return for fourth season, it now appears pretty much certain that it will be with a new composer, with White indicating that perhaps Tapia de Veer’s time on the show had simply run its course.
“By the time the third season came around, he’d won Emmys and he had his song go viral, he didn’t want to go through the process with me, he didn’t want to go to sessions,” he claims. “He always had like this contemptuous smirk on his face whenever he was dealing with me like he thought I was a chimp or something... He's just definitely making a big deal out of just a creative difference of opinion."
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