By Alyssa Heater

Heather Persons, ACE

The White Lotus, created, written and directed by Mike White, is a dark comedy series that follows the drama surrounding wealthy people on their lavish vacations. With a large cast and shocking, intertwined storylines, it is no surprise that it snagged 23 Emmy nominations — for both acting and craft — for its second season.

We spoke with Emmy-nominated The White Lotus editor Heather Persons, ACE, to discuss her approach to cutting the series while working in Italy, Los Angeles and Hawaii, and how she collaborated with showrunner White. For Season 2, she edited Episodes 2, 4 and 6, while editor John Valerio, ACE, cut 1, 3, 5 and 7.  Persons was nominated for her work on Episode 6, “Abductions,” and Valerio for his work on Episode 7,  “Arrivederci.”

Let’s find out more from Persons…

How would you describe the pace of The White Lotus Season 2, and how does it differ from the first? Does Mike White collaborate with you in setting the pace?
I wouldn’t say that the pace was very different in Season 2. It may have felt a bit livelier because we were covering more ground. For Season 1, we were confined to shooting solely in the Four Seasons Maui because of the pandemic, but for Season 2, we were able to roam all over Italy, and consequently, the world felt bigger. Mike wrote in more action-filled sequences, and there was more intercutting of different locations, so that helped it feel more pacey.

Mike cares most about the characters and is always wanting to make sure the emotional and comedic beats are in full flower; that’s his biggest concern. We are always just trying to land the storytelling, and if that means speeding something up or slowing something down, that’s what we do. Mike is not afraid to make something slower if it means the audience will feel the emotion more.

He’s an incredible artist. His work is surprising and original, and this project was fun with all the different storylines.

How do you approach cutting together a series that features an ensemble cast and multiple storylines that are all woven together? Can you talk about some of the challenges?
Something that really helped with cutting the various storylines together was the music. We had an incredible score from Cristobal Tapia de Veer and his colleague Kim Neundorf. We combined their music with cutaways to second unit footage — the hotel, the beach, the water, etc. — and found that this was a potent way to segue from one section to another.

We discovered this in the first season by accident… how do we get from this to that? We had some cool underwater footage, so we started experimenting. My co-editor, John Valerio, is great with transitions. In Season 2, we relied on paintings from the hotel and atmospheric footage around our locations. That was something that evolved over time. We didn’t plan it going in but found that it worked. It also helped immerse the audience in our stunning locations and made the story feel like it couldn’t happen anywhere else on earth.

Sometimes we realized that things weren’t working where they were, so we moved them, but very rarely did we drop a scene. Mike really knows what he wants, and he plans ahead. If we did move or drop something, it was usually because of tone. Sometimes we had to drop extremely funny things because tonally they didn’t fit in with the vibe in that sequence. That’s always hard to do. It’s also fun to play with how different stories bump up against each other. By shifting things, you create different connections. It’s a process of discovery.

Focusing on the episode “Abductions,” there is so much tension building between Harper and Ethan and their concerns of infidelity. Tanya is becoming more suspicious of Quentin, and Portia is realizing she is in too deep with Jack. How do you use editing to enhance that uncomfortable feeling?
This was the penultimate episode, so we were really tightening the screws for what would be resolved in the finale. Things got chaotic as they were coming to a head. We used a lot of different techniques to enhance the tension: speeding or slowing the pace, adding intense or emotional music, creating montages. For instance, in the scene where the Di Grasso family goes to the farmhouse in hopes of having a family reunion, Mike wanted to slow the pace down almost to real time so it would feel very different from the insanity of the party at Quentin’s villa or when Valentina and Mia are having sex.

Slowing things down helps you feel Bert’s loss when he realizes that there is no going back and that he’ll never be reconnected with his dead wife. When you have moments like that intercut with Tanya partying and getting down with the coke dealer, it’s like an existential truth bomb going off in the middle of a crazy party. The party is like taking sugar with your medicine; it helps it go down.

A lot of the tension and unexpected surprises were built into the writing of that episode, and we did everything we could to maximize that. Often, it is a combination of what you’re showing when, the pace at which you’re cutting, and what you’re doing with the music. Especially in that episode, we have operatic scenes and quiet, heartbreaking counterpoints. I think that’s what makes it compelling. You have the party insanity, where we are cutting more quickly in montages with great Italian party music, and slow-motion footage intercut with emotional dialogue scenes.

For instance, the scene where Jack drunkenly spills secrets to Portia while in the hotel is devastating because you realize that there is something very broken in him and that this girl is in over her head. It’s much darker than you ever imagined. It’s a quiet, slow scene between two people on a bed intercut with Tanya at the party.  It’s the contrast between those kinds of moments and how we treat them editorially that builds the tension and keeps the surprises coming.

Absolutely. You spoke a bit about incorporating music and sound. Will you share a bit about your collaboration with those teams?
We have a wonderful sound team supervised by Kathryn Madsen. The show is pretty naturalistic. There are lots of waves, lots of ambience, and Kathryn and her team sweetened all that. As a writer, Mike cares about the dialogue, and Kathryn is excellent with that.

Our sound mixers, led by Christian Minkler, were great. It was a new experience for us, mixing remotely from Hawaii, but we made it work. Composers Cristobal Tapia de Veer and Kim Neundorf were instrumental in helping us create the mood and vibe of the show. It was a thrill to get their work and incorporate it into the show. I would literally be blasting the cues as they came in and dancing around the cutting room.

They captured the danger, the sexy anxiety and wildness of the show. I temped with a cue from Christos in the pilot, and Mike loved it and quickly hired him. I’m so happy that we got to work together. I was lucky that my co-editor, John, was great with music too. He was an inspiration.

Were there any scenes in Season 2 that were particularly fun or challenging to edit?
There was a sequence in Episode 4 where Mia is plotting to sleep with the piano player in an attempt to further her singing career. She feeds him the wrong pill and he collapses. I had so much fun with that because it was ridiculous and delightful, like a French bedroom farce. It was sort of a puzzle for Mike and me to figure out how to keep all the balls in the air, to make it feel like a fluffy confection while moving other darker elements of the story forward.

I also loved cutting Episode 6, especially the party sequence with Tanya at the villa. Our DP, Xavier Grobet (ASC), shot beautiful footage for that, so it was high drama and gorgeous mayhem all the way.

Did you work on-set in Italy or remotely?
John and I each went to the set in Italy for about a month, then we cut at home in Los Angeles after that. Once shooting wrapped, we all worked from Hawaii for the remainder of the project because that’s where Mike lives and likes to work. The benefit of us going to Italy was that we could be involved in shooting b-roll. John worked with that unit to get us lots of footage inspired by the location and the story we were telling.

Did you use any remote viewing software to help with collaboration in these different locations?
Typically when working on-location, we’d take the whole editorial crew with full Avid Media Composer setups, which can be expensive. For The White Lotus, we wanted to experiment with doing something more mobile, so we just took our laptops and worked offline every day. I traveled and worked in five or six different cities and would plug my laptop in at the hotel and get to work. It was beautiful. Then at the end of the day, I would forward my work to my assistant, Bob Allen, in Los Angeles, and he would update the system.

It was a bit cumbersome and would be hard to do for an entire show, but just for a month, it was fine. When we got back to Los Angeles, we got all caught up.

What software do you use for editing?
I have only ever worked on Avid. I don’t use any plugins. I once heard a stylist say, “I can cut hair with a Coke bottle.” I’m kind of like that — just give me any Avid, and I can cut it for you. I’m not really a technology nerd. I’m a story nerd.

What was it like editing a project that incorporates two different languages, English and Italian, and how do you create balance? Are there people on-set who help with translating and cohesion?
I actually started taking Italian classes a few months before the show started because I thought it would be fun. I enjoyed it so much. We had several Italian actors with varying degrees of English fluency, so we did have people on-set helping them. Mike’s assistant, Chiara Nanni, who is originally from Catania, joined us in Hawaii as we finished cutting the project. She would look at clips and tell us if anything didn’t make sense or if we needed to adjust any dialogue.

You can kind of figure out what actors are saying if they’re following the script, but sometimes they ad-lib. Once we would lock an episode, Chiara would listen through and let us know what needed to be fixed. Sometimes we have subtitle cards, which she would double-check. We’d go through all of those and figure out what was working and what wasn’t. Having her there was extremely helpful.

Heather Persons and Bob Allen

That’s awesome. Tell me about your assistant editor. What is your collaboration process like?
My assistant editor, Bob Allen, is a total pro. He’s worked with many of the greats — Dody Dorn, Francoise Bonnot — and is the best assistant in the world. When we work together, he does all of the sound work and mixing and all of the VFX. He has great taste and loves movies. We’ve worked together on several shows now, so we really have our system down. We’re in London working on a movie now.

Alyssa Heater is a writer and marketer in the entertainment industry. When not writing, you can find her front row at heavy metal shows or remodeling her cabin in the San Gabriel Mountains.