Imagine a hospital room: in the bed is a cheerful man, white hair in a Tintin quiff. His eyes are Swedish blue, his lashes a fine blond fan. He has a nebuliser strapped to his face, he’s taking deep breaths so that the steroid can loosen the bronchitis that has seized his chest. Outside is the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai and beyond, hills of tropical rainforest. But our patient is focused inward, mind ablaze. He is watching scenes unfold – a hotel, flame-lit, characters in frenzied dialogue. There are monks, mafia. Somewhere, echoing gunshots, causing his limbs to twitch. Over the next two nights the entire season of The White Lotus 3 rolls before him, “as a fever dream”. The patient is Mike White, creator, writer and director of the HBO blockbuster. “By morning, I’m like, I just came up with the storyline! It was wild. I felt like I’d done crack.”
White – wiry, smiley, with a voice that vibrates emotion – immediately got on to his producer, David Bernad. Bernad has worked with White for nearly 20 years and is a solid, unflustered man, the perfect foil for White’s creative mania. As White relayed how he’d hallucinated the new season’s plot, and the stories had come cosmically through the magic of Thai spirits, Bernad thought “interesting” and turned his mind to casting, locations and crew. “Mike is a very singular film-maker,” he says.
