Gabe Hilfer (‘The White Lotus’ music supervisor) on getting ‘the showrunner’s vision up on the screen’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Gabe Hilfer is now a two-time Emmy nominee in the relatively new category of Best Music Supervision, earning his first last year for Netflix’s “Ozark” and his second this year for HBO’s “The White Lotus.” “I’m super humbled and flattered to be nominated for two totally different projects,” Hilfer tells me. “Literally it could not have been more different episodes to be nominated for.” Watch the exclusive video interview above.

“A lot of the source music, the license music, the on-camera performances — all of that stuff is really what this category is about,” Hilfer explains about Best Music Supervision, which was first handed out at the 2017 Emmys. He adds that a music supervisor works on a project “from the script level and figures out how to get the showrunner’s vision up on the screen through songs, through performances, through pre-records, and all of what goes into that.” The showrunner in this case is Mike White, who’s personally up for the same three Emmys — producing, writing and directing — that he won for last year.

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The third episode of “The White Lotus” Season 2, titled “Bull Elephants,” is the one Hilfer chose as his 2023 Emmy submission. That’s the installment where Tanya’s (Jennifer Coolidge) husband leaves her in Italy alone, and then Harper (Aubrey Plaza) and Daphne (Meghann Fahy) go away for the night and their husbands party back at the hotel.

“I felt like it spanned a really interesting breadth of what we were doing this season,” Hilfer notes about why he picked that episode. “We had some more typical stuff, which was the painting the picture, the ambient montage stuff at the beginning with setting up Italy. There’s a band on camera playing the ‘Godfather’ music. There’s Giuseppe playing a song at the piano in the restaurant of the hotel. And then I liked a lot of the stuff that we were able to do at the end.”

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Series composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer is a “genius,” Hilfer readily admits. “He and Mike have a shorthand, and he and the editors work together closely as well.” One moment where it all comes together is at the end of “Bull Elephants” when a club jam, “Piena” by Myss Keta ft. Gue, “exemplifies what they’re going through and you can almost feel them getting drunk in the way that the camera movements are going on,” he says, referring to Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Cameron (Theo James).

Also in our exclusive video interview, Hilfer talks about how one of his proudest moments from Season 2 was when “Il Nostro Concerto” by Umberto Bindi kicks in during Ethan and Cameron’s game of jet ski chicken, and how he called back the “Madama Butterfly” opera with Tanya’s character. The music supervisor concludes by teasing (what he can) about the upcoming “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon” spin-off.

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