It’s not hyperbole to say 2024 has been the year of Snoop Dogg, from inspiring global memes at the Paris Summer Olympics to slipping comfortably into his Coach’s chair on Season 26 of The Voice. Now, he’s gaining attention for taking point in one of funniest sequences of Focus Features’ Piece By Piece, the animated (all in LEGO) biopic of artist Pharrell Williams (another former Voice Coach).
The film’s Academy Award-winning director, Morgan Neville, recently sat down with NBC Insider to talk about the hilarious and extremely clever sequence that recreates the fateful day when Snoop and his entourage rolled up on Pharrell’s studio to make music history.
RELATED: Piece by Piece Director Morgan Neville Reveals How Pharrell and LEGO Changed His Career
Making “Drop It Like It’s Hot” era Snoop Dogg PG enough for Piece by Piece
Williams and his co-producer Chad Hugo (under the moniker of the Neptunes) established their career creating beats and songs for huge artists like Gwen Stefani (another Voice Coach!) and Jay-Z. As seen in the Piece by Piece clip above, in 2004, Snoop Dogg reached out to the Neptunes to help him broaden his sound. They came up with the singular mouth click percussion loop and co-wrote what would become one of the rapper’s biggest hits, “Drop It Like It’s Hot.”
That amazing moment in Pharrell’s history certainly stands out in Piece by Piece. Neville and his team handled the… shall we say, more adult elements of Snoop’s language and lifestyle at the time with a visual joke that gets huge laughs in the film. As the “smoke” that covers Snoop and his crew permeates the Neptunes’ studio, and the language gets salty, LEGO Pharrell and Chad remedy it by spraying down the environment with a PG spray that brings the content back to family-friendly.
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Addressing the creativity in the scene, Neville said it ended up solving several things they were hoping to achieve with Piece by Piece. “With animation, you can time travel in a way,” he told NBC Insider. “I could take the stems to “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” and I could just hear Pharrell [mouth-popping]. And then suddenly, it’s like you’re next to him in a booth at some point in time, and he’s just making these sounds. So this idea of kind of being there at the moment of creation was something that was really fun to do in the animation.
“And then the story behind it, Pharrell and Snoop told me had to do with a fair amount of marijuana smoke,” Neville continued, laughing. “One thing I agreed on at the very beginning when we made this film was that we weren’t going to make an R rated film. So, we had the smoke [problem]. And then it became this debate about if we could explain the smoke and we could get a PG rating. I was like, ‘What are we going to do?’ And then finally, it really was one of these [ideas], like, ‘Well, let’s just give them a can of PG spray. That’ll be it!’ It was a solution to a problem that actually became one of my favorite little jokes in the film.”
Piece by Piece is in theaters now! Get your tickets here!
