Gorgeous Sicilian landscapes,vintage lollipop sex videos men and women courting each other, two goats — ahem — going at it... These are just a few of the scenes you'll witness whenever you watch the brilliant opening credits for The White Lotus Season 2.
Accompanied by Cristobal Tapia de Veer's remixed version of the Season 1 theme song, this all-new title sequence begins as a frescoed Italian dream before descending into lusty madness — much like The White Lotus Season 2 itself. It's a perfect encapsulation of the show's themes, and it comes to us courtesy of Mark Bashore and Katrina Crawford from the studio Plains of Yonder.
Bashore and Crawford are also the team behind Season 1's lush, wallpaper-inspired opening, with recent work including the magical title sequence of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
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In a video call with Mashable, Bashore, and Crawford dug deep into the secrets of the Season 2 main title sequence, from its early inspiration, to the technical aspects of its creation, to the layered meanings of each title card.
Finding inspiration in a Sicilian villa
This sequence is on fire... literally. Credit: Plains of Yonder In episode 3 of Season 2, White Lotus Resort guests Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza) stay the night in the Sicilian town of Noto, in a palazzo whose walls are covered in elaborate frescoes. The frescoes are examples of the painting tradition of trompe-l'oeil, an optical illusion that tricks us into thinking we're gazing out onto 3D pastoral scenes through broken stone walls.
Look closely at the frescoes in the episode and you'll spot elements from the title sequence like fountains or statues. That's because Bashore, Crawford, and The White Lotus creator Mike White drew inspiration from the episode's shooting location — the real-life Villa Tasca in Palermo — to design the opening credits.
Crawford photographed the Villa Tasca frescoes to serve as a base for the sequence. Then, she and Bashore created their own paintings and hybridized frescoes new and old to form images that service The White Lotus Season 2's story beats and themes.
"Almost every shot has been altered in some way," said Bashore. "We created several [paintings] that are completely new, or maybe they contain a frame from the villa but the painting inside we did ourselves. So it's a total mix."
Almost every shot has been altered in some way.
That means that when you're watching the credits, you're taking in a combination of frescoes that are centuries old and composites that are much newer — a perfect complement to the theme song's blend of classical and techno dance music.
"Some of the paintings are 60 days old," Bashore estimated. "Hopefully you can't tell the difference."
Crawford explained the process of creating new images using Plaza's title card as an example. When Plaza's name shows up, it is accompanied by an image of a bird attacking another bird — an image that Bashore and Crawford assembled from multiple sections of the Villa Tasca's frescoes.
These birds weren't originally fighting. Credit: Plains of Yonder "There were [paintings of] birds in the villa, but where they were is not where they ended up [in the credits]," said Crawford. "They had a little journey of their own." Bashore and Crawford took the background image from one painting in the villa and two different birds from other frescoes. To make the birds interact, the creative team altered their positions and the beak of the attacking bird, then added falling feathers to the background to emphasize the severity of the attack. Crawford described the birds as being a more "simple" example, as other credit-specific frescoes required even more alterations and fine-tuning.
One of the more intense alterations involved a fresco of a fisherman overlooking the sea, with a castle on a cliff sitting in the background. In the sequence, the castle is on fire — a White Lotus-only addition — and therefore becomes the main draw of the image. "We in many ways changed the focus of what was already painted," said Bashore.
Everything means something in The White Lotus Season 2 credits
The cherubs have a special significance. Credit: Plains of Yonder For Bashore and Crawford, every second of the White Lotus title sequence was an opportunity to tell a story. Each time you see an actor's name onscreen, the corresponding fresco speaks to their character in some way.
"For each character, we came back with 10 storylines that would work," Crawford said. Among the cut storylines? A hot tub sequence, likely a mirror to the episode 2 hot tub scene between Dom (Michael Imperioli), Mia (Beatrice Grannò), and Lucia (Simona Tabasco).
The storylines and images that remain are wonderfully rich, and often come with layers of meaning. Take the cherubs that pop up along with Fahy's name. "Meghann Fahy gets the cherubs because they're like [Daphne's] babies who she's obsessed with, but they're also these cheeky creatures in mythology that are wreaking havoc and playing games, which is also sort of characteristic of her," said Crawford.
The title sequence draws from mythology elsewhere as well. We get a direct reference to the Greek myth of Leda and the swan, in which Zeus rapes a young woman in his swan form. It's a striking image that points to darker undertones in the season's discussion of sexuality.
The credits reference Leda and the swan. Credit: Plains of Yonder In a nod to myth and art history, Bashore and Crawford incorporated dolphins into key moments of the opening sequence, with dolphin statues side-eyeing characters from their perches on a fountain. "A lot of Renaissance painters use [dolphins] to represent things like rashness or making crazy, impulsive decisions, but they're also always associated with romance. They're associated with Venus, the Roman goddess of love," said Crawford. Think Raphael's famous 1512 fresco The Triumph of Galatea, depicting the water nymph on dolphin-drawn chariot and painted for the Villa Farnesina in Rome, to Roman sculptures of Venus flanked by dolphins. All these references add to the dreaminess of the opening and establish the season's Mediterranean setting.
Animals, including the dolphins, proved to be valuable storytelling tools for Bashore and Crawford. "It's almost easier to explain people through animals than people through people," said Bashore, who estimated that 50 percent of the animals you see in the title sequence are new additions to the frescoes.
Some animals are innocent, like the sweet little lamb who appears alongside Haley Lu Richardson's name. Richardson plays Portia, a 20-something young woman stuck in Sicily with her volatile boss Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge). Like the lamb, Crawford described Portia's character as "lost."
"She doesn't know what's happening. She's in this beautiful place, but she's just stuck sitting there."
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Is Cameron the dog, the statue, or both? Credit: Plains of Yonder A personal favorite animal of mine is on the more devious side: It's a small dog lifting its leg to pee on a statue of a naked, muscular man. The dog and statue show up with Theo James's name, and like the other frescoes, this one carries multiple meanings. One interpretation is that the statue represents James's character Cameron. He's a smug, wealthy jerk who puts himself on a pedestal, and in episode 1, he strips naked in front of Harper. (In a cheeky reference to that scene, the opening credits introduce the statue with a closeup on its genitalia before zooming out to reveal the full picture.)
However, Bashore and Crawford argue that Cameron is just as much the peeing dog as he is the statue. As Bashore told it: "Somebody said, 'oh this is funny. There's a dog peeing on the Theo James statue,' and Katrina said, 'no, maybe that is [Cameron]. That dog lifting its leg is a pretty excellent metaphor for toxic masculinity.'"
Sexy, sexy chaos
Things are about to get wild. Credit: Plains of Yonder Individually, each image of the opening tells a story. Put them all together, and you get an epic tale in three acts. According to Crawford, the sequence "starts with a sense of awe. It's very beautiful and there's more true, romantic intention. It's kind of operatic." Then, roughly around the moment we see the attacking birds accompanying Plaza's name, the mood begins to shift. "That classic White Lotusmusic comes in and that's when things start to slip off the rails. All is not totally well in paradise," said Bashore.
Finally, we descend into horny, violent disarray. Between goats mating and oral sex on the beach, we catch glimpses of a potential stabbing and a burning castle. By this point, the music evokes what Bashore described as a "sweaty nightclub." He continued, saying, "Everything becomes unhinged. Even the architecture becomes sexual and erotic."
There were no overtly sexual scenes on the walls of the Villa Tasca. Romantic scenes like a man wooing a woman by playing pipes were the furthest these frescoes strayed towards the erotic chaos we see in the credits. This meant that Bashore and Crawford had to create the more suggestive scenes themselves, all while making sure they toed the line between innuendo and outright erotica. Bashore mentioned that getting the pants right on the person receiving oral sex ended up being one of the hardest challenges of creating the sequence.
Architecture, but make it suggestive. Credit: Plains of Yonder However, some images ended up taking on more suggestive meaning based on their placement in the opening. Take the pink structure with three large holes in it. By itself, it's not necessarily sexual. When it's bookended by mating goats and statues of naked women, you get a new perspective. "When you're in this mindset, and you have this music, suddenly it becomes something more," said Crawford.
To emphasize the lusty madness of the credits' final act, Bashore and Crawford began incorporating more animated elements into the frescoes towards the end of the sequence. Statues' eyes shift to take in their surroundings, smoke and flames billow from a castle, a fountain spurts suggestively upwards. The movements are subtle but help build momentum, adding more frantic energy to the credits as the camera zips around each fresco.
In 90 wild, wonderful seconds, Bashore and Crawford both capture the feeling of The White Lotus Season 2 and create a memorable opening sequence. You'll be pausing, rewinding, and marveling at every frame. "Ultimately our job is to get you ready to watch the show," said Crawford. "So if it gets you in that mindset of [looking for] fun little details and thinking about sexual politics, then we've done our job."
New episodes of The White Lotus Season 2 are available weekly, every Sunday at 9 p.m. ET.
Topics HBO The White Lotus