There’s a reason the new ‘White Lotus’ opening credits feel different

“But what is death?” I am sitting down with Katrina Crawford and we are here to talk about the White Lotus Season 3 opening credits. Together with Mark Bashore, Crawford runs the creative studio Plains of Yonder, which has crafted the White Lotus main titles for every season so far. But that question about death wasn’t posed by me. It was posed by her. And it challenges us to reflect on the meaning of death, and the many ways to die.

Since White Lotus season 3 premiered on February 16, the internet has been abuzz with theories and criticisms around who died and what the opening sequence means. In response, HBO has said: “You’ll get it soon enough.” So while we wait, we decided to call up Crawford and Bashore so we can dissect one of the most iconic main titles in modern history. The biggest takeaway? Some things can have more than one meaning.

Easter eggs or red herrings?

Plains of Yonder has made over a dozen main titles for shows like The Decameron and The Lord of the Rings TV show, Rings of Power. But Crawford says that this title, for White Lotus Season 3, is by far the longest they’ve ever spent developing.

While some showrunners don’t consider the main title until the end, Crawford says that Mike White gave the team a whole 10 months to craft the sequence. When they started, Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who wrote the music for previous seasons’ openers, was still composing the new soundtrack. The crew wasn’t even shooting yet. All they had was the script. White Lotus Season 3 has eight episodes. They got the script for the first seven episodes. “We know a lot,” Crawford tells me. But they don’t know who dies.

Crawford combed through those scrips and crafted meticulous profiles for every character, where she tried to understand who these characters are—or who she thinks they are. Once the profiles were complete, she assigned dozens of images to them. Sometimes, she paired a character with an animal (a stoned monkey for the North Carolina mom played by Parker Posy). Sometimes, she crafted a scenario around them (Jason Isaacs’s Timothy Ratliff character appears coiled up in a tree with knives for branches.) These images might intimate a character’s fate or personality, but of course, some interpretations are more literal than others. “Maybe someone is presenting one way, but something else is truth,” she says.

Animal instincts

As with every season, animals carried much of the symbolism. “We’ve always found that using animals are a better metaphor than people,” says Bashore. Season 1 was obsessed with monkeys; Season 2 introduced humping goats; Season 3 goes all in on mythological creatures that are half-human, half-beast. (Crawford spent a month poring over Thai mythology books.)

The intro opens with a circus of animals, and the first humans to be portrayed are human faces attached to bird bodies. A bit later into the sequence, Lek Patravadi’s Sritala Hollinger character (the hotel owner) appears by a pond, holding a creature that is half human, half bird—perhaps a clue about her mysteriously absent husband.

Most of these metaphors are predictably obscure. Amy Lou Wood (who plays Chelsea) appears in the middle of an incriminating scene depicting a leopard that has bitten off a deer’s head with two foxes bearing witness. Which animal is she? Meanwhile, Natasha Rothwell, who plays Belinda from Season 1, is portrayed next to a stork staring down at its reflection in the water, while a crocodile is lying in lurk. Will it snap her up in its jaws?

Fiction or reality?

That the team spent ten months developing the title isn’t so surprising considering the complexity of these characters. But there is one more character in the story, and that is Thailand.

Like with the first two seasons, the location plays a key role in the story. To build that sense of place, the team spent ten days filming at three Royal temples in Thailand. “We shot the daylights out of it,” says Bashore, noting that they took over 1,000 photos of patterns, colors, outfits, and of course, those iconic Thai rooflines. “We looked for quick visual cues, patterns that feel iconically Thailand.”

Getting permits to film was no small feat considering the sacred nature of the temples. The team had to coordinate access with HBO, and other logistical challenges meant that the title took longer to make. But could the delay signal something else? Some shows, like Game of Thrones, have created main titles that change from week to week. Was the White Lotus Season 3 main title so challenging to make because the team had to tweak it as the season progresses? Crawford gives a cheeky shrug that neither confirms nor denies it: “We can’t talk about anything you haven’t seen.”

What we can talk about is what Crawford calls “the Temple of White Lotus.” Indeed, the temples help anchor the show in Thailand, but the real star of the show is the White Lotus resort, which may have been filmed at the Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui, but remains a fictional place. To emphasize the otherworldly setting, the team broke down the photographs they took into little squares and shuffled them to create new images out of them—like a patchwork that looks and feels real, but ultimately isn’t. “We’re not trying to say this is a real place,” says Bashore. “It’s just a vibe we’re soaking in.”

This vibe ultimately blossoms in the seven worlds the team created for the title sequence. The story begins in the jungle, then unfolds in a village, a temple, a pond (in which we see Sam Nivola’s body afloat), a gloomier forest with ominous snakes coiled around trees, an epic battle scene, and the grand finale—“disaster at sea”—where a throng of men gets swallowed by giant fish.

Could this mass killing scene signify more than one death in the show? Crawford’s response? You know it already: “But what is death?”