When The White Lotus cinematographer Ben Kutchins read Mike White’s scripts for his Thailand-set season, he was immediately excited at the visual potential White baked into his screenplays. The two artists originally collaborated on the Maui-set season, so Kutchins was excited to return to the White Lotus world and explore the visual splendor that Thailand had to offer.
Plus, he wanted to visually convey the deeper emotions and boundary-pushing writing that White brought to the project.
“I really wanted to create an environment that had a similar tone to season one but elevate the intensity of the character’s anxiety and elevate the portrayal of the environment,” Kutchins recalled.
Thailand offered no limit of gorgeous locales for The White Lotus cinematographer. In a way, those moments were easier to capture. He leveraged an older model Sony Venice to introduce a bit of grit and grain into the image. That allows him to honor the films and cinematographers that influenced him (Gordon Willis being a huge inspiration). What truly challenged Kutchins was the juxtaposition of the lush resort setting with the chaos of the Bangkok-set sequences in his Emmy-nominated episode “Killer Instincts.”
Kutchins also found himself drawn to the Rick and Chelsea (Emmy nominees Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood) storyline and Rick’s revenge subplot. Those sequences drew Kutchins and the action away from the resort into a very urban environment, something the native New Yorker understands intimately.
The episode also offered Kutchins the opportunity to lens one of the funniest sequences in the season. Rick (Goggins) and friend Frank (Sam Rockwell) enter into a brief con with Sritala (Lek Patravadi) in order to get closer to her mysterious husband. Yet, the two friends obviously failed to align their stories at all, setting Frank up for some high comedy as he attempts to take impersonate a world-famous director.
“I find that I very much feed off of the chemistry of actors in a scene, and that’s the thing that guides me a lot when thinking about camera, lens choice, lighting choices, where the camera goes,” Kutchins explained. “It is often motivated by what the characters are doing in the scene as opposed to whatever my pre-production plan might’ve been. You find out what’s important once you see the actors start doing the scene. Part of my job is to respond accordingly to, as quietly and nimbly as possible, what’s happening and honor the performance.”
“Killer Instincts” also allows Kutchins the opportunity to capture Thailand at night as Mook (Lalisa Manobal) and Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) finally go on their first date and attend a boxing match. He leveraged his hand-held camera to capture the intimacy and physicality of the fight scenes which editor John Valerio spliced throughout the episode. That allowed for a heightening of tension as the episode progressed and as Gaitok’s perspective on violence changes. It also offered Kutchins the opportunity to juxtapose those scenes and Gaitok’s progression against their beautifully lit date sequence.
Outside of the visual splendor of the White Lotus resort and the chaos of the city-set sequences, Kutchins also had the opportunity to lens some quieter, more introspective scenes as Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) spend the night at the local Buddhist monastery. As the son of Buddhist priests, he took inspiration from the idyllic version of what he experienced as a child. He was able to visually explore spirituality in a way that both represented Piper and Lochlan and drew from his own interpretations of spirituality.
“I spent a lot of time in temples as a kid, and I think a lot of it was sort of inspired by the idyllic version of what I saw as a kid and what spirituality meant to me as a kid. I think it was inspired a lot by the awe of a sacred spiritual space,” Kutchins reflected. “These are two very confused kids, so I played with the heightened sense of reality for them. I wanted to push the sense of heightened realism, this slightly romanticized view of the world, and simultaneously keep it grounded. After all they eventually land on, ‘God, this place is kind of gross’.”
All three seasons of The White Lotus stream exclusively on HBO MAX.
