Season four is being shot in Cannes, Saint-Tropez and Monaco, it is set during the film festival, and the Martinez has been renamed. Here is what that actually looks like from the ground.
What is happening
HBO confirmed in April that the fourth season of The White Lotus had begun filming on the Côte d’Azur. Cannes, Saint-Tropez and Monaco, with some scenes in Paris, though the story stays on the coast. Filming runs from the end of April through to the end of October, so it has been going on all summer and is still going on now.
The premise, per HBO’s own logline, is a new group of guests and staff over the span of a week, set during the Cannes Film Festival. Which is to say Mike White has pointed his camera at the one week of the year when this town is at its most absurd, and we are all very interested to see what he does with it.
The hotels, renamed
Two real places are playing fictional ones. The Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette becomes the White Lotus Cannes. Airelles Château de la Messardière, the nineteenth-century pile above Saint-Tropez, becomes the White Lotus du Cap.
Both are exactly the sort of place the show exists to skewer, which is presumably the point. The Martinez is Art Deco, opened in 1929, and during the festival it is where the deals happen. If you have ever wondered what the bar looks like at two in the morning in May, the answer is: like the opening five minutes of a White Lotus episode.
What you will actually see
Less than you hope. Film units are closed, streets are cordoned in short sections, and most of what happens is three hours of waiting followed by ninety seconds of someone walking through a door. Actors have been photographed on the Croisette in costume, and a good deal of the shooting has been inside hotels you cannot walk into.
If you happen to pass a set, the etiquette is the same as anywhere: stay behind the tape, do not shout, and do not put a phone in anybody’s face. Cannes has been a film town for eighty years. The crews are polite if you are.
Where to go instead, which is the useful part
The places the show is using are largely shut to you while it is using them. The places it is about are not. If what you want is the Riviera at its most theatrical:
- The Croisette hotel bars. The Martinez bar has barely changed since 1929 and you do not need a room to sit in it. The rooftops and hotel bars page has the rest, with which are open to anyone and which are guests only.
- Saint-Tropez and the gulf. The Messardière sits above the town in thirty-odd acres of parasol pines. You will not get past the gate, but the peninsula around it is the real thing rather than the set dressing.
- Monaco. The third location, and the one where the satire writes itself. It is an hour east.
What it means for next May
Nobody has announced a release date. Late 2026 has been mentioned, 2027 more often. Whenever it lands, the festival is going to be busier the following year, because that is what happened to Taormina and to Koh Samui, and neither of those had a film festival to begin with.
If you were thinking of coming to Cannes in May at some point, the argument for doing it sooner rather than later has just got stronger. Festival fortnight already books a year ahead. It is not going to loosen.
One small local note
The production is reportedly the most expensive season yet, somewhere around a hundred and twenty million dollars, and a good deal of that has been spent here: crews in hotels, drivers, caterers, fixers, extras. In a town whose economy runs on eleven weeks of congress and one fortnight of festival, six months of a television production is not nothing. People are pleased, and not only for the gossip.