In ‘The White Lotus,’ Mike White Takes You on Vacation

Last September, the writer-director Mike White checked into a recently reopened but still deserted Four Seasons on Maui. He was the first guest since March. The staff gave him a standing ovation.

White, 51, does not look like a man who benefits from extended equatorial stints. “I’m not tannable,” he said, a friendly ghost in the Zoom window. “I’m albino, practically.”

Though he made time for the occasional poolside cocktail, White mostly spent the long tropical days shooting and editing “The White Lotus,” the six-episode limited series that debuts on HBO on July 11. It is the first show White has created since the canceled-too-soon “Enlightened,” which aired about a decade ago, and it shares that earlier series’s conviction that living your best life usually pushes a lot of other people into living worse ones.

A spiny satire of privilege set almost entirely at a luxury resort a lot like the Four Seasons, “The White Lotus” scrutinizes the interactions between guests and staff, most of them as toxic as a blowfish liver. Following a year in which few people could safely and sensibly travel, the show offers the consoling thought that maybe tropical vacations were never that great anyway.

For just over 20 years, beginning with the indie movie “Chuck & Buck,” in which he also starred, White has made a career of examining, often in unsettling fashion, the gulf between the people we imagine ourselves to be and the people we actually are.

“He just gets to the core of what people are thinking and feeling, instead of the show that most people put on,” said the actress Jennifer Coolidge, a friend who plays an overwrought guest in “The White Lotus.” In White’s scripts, he pokes his finger into those disparities and typically comes away with something very sticky.

An artist of both empathy and razor-wire wit — both qualities were evident during an hourlong video call from his home in Los Angeles — White has real affection for his characters even as he shows them at their most craven and appetitive. His signature obsession is the thorny connection between good intentions and the bad actions they so often provoke.

“Most of us are just wanting to be the best person we can be, but we’re always falling short of that,” he said. He includes himself in that majority.

White had not necessarily intended to make another drama, especially during a pandemic. “I don’t really like working, to be honest,” he said. (The half-dozen collaborators I spoke with, all of whom described an insane and intractable work ethic, might dispute this.) As an introvert, he figured that quarantine would agree with him. And it did, until it didn’t.

When Francesca Orsi, HBO’s executive vice president of drama series, called, he was feeling a little depressed. He was treating that depression by taking a road trip with his dog. He texted her some pictures.

Orsi, who had dealt with White on “Enlightened” and likes to check in with him every few months, was looking for someone to replenish a programming slate shrunk by the virus. She made him a proposal: Could he make a show in one location? For less than $3 million dollars per episode? Could he do it safely?

“It sounded hellish,” White said.

But he decided that he could, and almost immediately he had an idea. Growing up in Pasadena, Calif., White took budget vacations to Hawaii with his family. They awakened something in him, an awareness of otherness. “It was kind of the first place where I realized there is another place and another culture and another life outside of the life I lived in Pasadena,” he said.

About 10 years ago, White bought a writer’s retreat on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. He often spends half the year there. He has read up on Hawaii’s history, particularly the wounds U.S. imperialism has inflicted. And he has thought about the ways in which people like him keep those wounds from healing. As a kid, he loved luau night, when hotel employees would don traditional dress and dance for the guests. He thinks about that experience differently now.

“There’s something about vacationing in other people’s realities,” he said.

So when Orsi made the call, he knew almost immediately that he wanted to set a show there. “I just was like, I should just do a show about people on vacation who have money, and how money is impacting all of their relationships,” he said.

Because his work always combines imagination and self-interrogation, he drew on his own hula-positive experiences to create the squirmy feel of “The White Lotus.” Here is Nicole, Connie Britton’s oblivious fempreneur, on luau night: “I think it’s just a way for them to honor their culture and they seem to be having a really good time.” As Nicole’s daughter says, “Mom! Cringe!”

White wrote the first episode at the end of August and had the other five completed by the end of September. In late October the shoot began, with the entire cast — Coolidge, Britton, Steve Zahn, Natasha Rothwell and Jake Lacy among them — quarantining together at the Maui hotel. Sometimes, during prep, White would look out of the window of his room and see some of the actors splashing below. (An occasional actor, White did not write a role for himself into the script.)

“I felt like I was like the host who had a cool party, but I had to work the kitchen. But it still felt good,” he said. “It was a pleasure to feel like people had been bounced out of their pandemic prisons to come and party at the Four Seasons.”

While White’s stories typically focus on a sole protagonist, “The White Lotus” is an ensemble piece, with multiple subplots exploring the perversions of power against a background of astonishing natural beauty. Actors quickly signed on, even though the salaries were unspectacular.

“There just was no saying no to Mike White,” said Britton, who had worked with him on the 2017 movie “Beatriz at Dinner.”

She had thought that a shoot at a luxury resort would be the best way to return to work during a pandemic. And probably it was. But safety protocols and a tight schedule meant that the job didn’t feel very luxurious. To accommodate testing, the day often began at 3:30 a.m. and there was little time off.

Still, this low-key adversity bonded the company. Every night, they would gather together on the beach to watch the sun go down. Then they would wake up in darkness to do it all over again.

For a sun-bleached show, “The White Lotus” has plenty of darkness, too, and the light it casts on human nature rarely flatters. Coolidge would often read a script then approach White about her character’s actions. “I was like, Am I really going this route?”

White would tell her that yes, she was. “Because this is how human beings act, Jennifer,” he said.

Thinking of a few of the show’s scenes, scenes I had watched through my fingers, I asked White if he thought that real resort guests — real human beings — actually behave as badly as his characters do. “Oh, I think it’s way worse than the people in the show,” he said. “A lot of rich people are just used to being catered to. I don’t think they realize how overwhelming their needs are and how they’re so oppressed by their needs.”

He has seen that same behavior among his Hollywood colleagues. “People living that dream seem so miserable and frustrated,” he said. “They’re such hungry ghosts.” And he sees it in himself and then uses what he sees. Like Lacy’s real estate bro character, he has spent at least one vacation complaining about his assigned room. Maybe more than one.

“I want to be a virtuous person,” he explained. “I want people to think that I’m a good guy. At the same time, I’m human and I have base instincts, and I have things that I want that are embarrassing, but are true. So the selfless part of me and the selfish part of me are at odds.”

It’s that self-awareness and that self-indictment, articulated without shame, that gives White’s work its sweet-bitter flavor.

“He’s just a truly masterful observer of the world and of human behavior,” Britton said. “He’s also aware that he’s not immune to it.”

His work also champions a belief, however reluctant, that people might learn to behave better. “He has great empathy for the world,” Miguel Arteta, who has directed several of White’s movies, said. “He relates to how possible is it for us to improve upon ourselves; it is very difficult. I definitely see that love and caring and exasperation.”

White’s career has always oscillated between for-hire studio projects (“The Emoji Movie,” “The One and Only Ivan,” “Pitch Perfect 3”) and his indie comedies. Like “The White Lotus,” the most recent indie films, “Beatriz at Dinner,” which Arteta directed in 2017, and “Brad’s Status,” which followed just few months later, also explore the violence of entitlement, a theme that “The White Lotus” only enlarges.

“Nobody cedes their privilege,” Zahn’s self-absorbed father character says in a late episode. “That’s absurd. It goes against human nature. We’re all just trying to win the game of life.” Dad! Cringe!

Completing a show during a pandemic, a show that stars many of your favorite actors, is its own kind of privilege, of course. White recognizes this.

“I realized what a precious part of my life is collaborating with other people,” he said. “I’m never taking this for granted again.”

But like most forms of privilege, the shoot for “The White Lotus” exacted a price. For years, Hawaii has been White’s refuge. But having made the show there, the islands no longer feel like paradise.

“I now associate Hawaii with the most stressful nine months of my life, as far as work,” White said. “So I don’t know where to go.”