We shot this in LA and it was like in Downtown, right off of Los Angeles street.
Every now and then, we’ll get like one straggler, like one dude just like walking down the street
minding his own business and like seeing the money trickle on the ground and run after
it and try to grab it and pick it up and be like, “Oh fuck y’all.”
His manager hit me up and was like, “Yo this is Anderson’s new single.
It’s coming out soon.
We need to do a crazy video.
Write a treatment as if you had unlimited budget.
I need high speed chases and jumping out of helicopters and like Vegas trips, all kinds of shit.”
Maybe like 3 days before, I had to meet with Dr. Dre to get the okay on the video.
So I went to his house, or his castle in the hills.
He had me go through the treatment again and he was like, “Alright cool."
"This is cool."
"I fuck with it.”
And then literally, after I left his house, maybe like 2 hours later, he was like, “I
don’t know man.
I’m not really feeling it.”
You know, in order to be a great director, you have to be able to tell a story.
So I think one thing that stuck out to me was the ATM scene and I was like, yo so what
if we did all this stuff, all these crazy scenes, but just somehow implemented the ATM
into it?
When I first wrote the treatment, I honestly didn’t think that this would be possible.
I thought it was going to be all visual FX.
My boy Carlos was able to team up with these practical FX crew that kinda basically built
a malfunctioning ATM from scratch.
The way the money is shooting out is there is a Supreme money gun back here.
A couple years ago, Supreme put out like a money fun.
I was like yo, we could somehow rig a money gun in there.
I feel like it would work.
There’s like a remote control that connects off screen.
When you first get that big check, you kind of wile out.
You know what I’m saying?
I feel like the money spitting out represents that.
Forget the money flying around.
Imagine driving down the street and seeing a zebra.
Once we locked in on this scene, we knew we had a classic.
And it was all because of this guy right here man.
Soul, man, he’s only like 6 years old but he sings better than his dad, he dances better
than his dad, and he’s starting to play the drums.
And we couldn’t really figure out where to put him at ‘cause some of the scenes
were like kind of too risqué.
There’s a picture with Mike Tyson and we was like, we wanna recreate this scene.
The animal company that we rented the zebra from, they had tigers but they had like labor
laws for cub tigers.
So we either had to get a big tiger or another animal.
We were like, let’s go with the little zebra.
What was dope about the zebra is that we were able to create a mini version for my man Soul
to ride.
The day of the shoot, it was just a white horse.
And I’m just like, I know it’s a white horse but like, it’s close to a zebra but
it’s just not right.
And I think at the last second, one of our gaffers just said, “Yo I got some tape.”
And he got some electric tape and just taped it all over the white horse.
And then you know, made it official.
This scene right here was probably the most ambitious out of the scenes that we attempted
to do.
Bro this pool is so big.
This pool is at least 200 feet wide.
Our producer was trying to figure out how much does it cost to fill a pool up with fake money?
We did the math and I think it’s like a hundred dollars per inch.
I think to fill this pool up, ideally, we were looking at spending $100,000 to like
barely fill it halfway up and that wasn’t about to happen.
So we figured it out.
We was like yo, let’s just figure out if we can do it visual FX wise.
The pool is empty and there's a big green foam pit right here.
So each time Anderson jumped, he would jump down into this foam pit.
Anderson was super game.
He maybe jumped into that foam pit 20 times until we got the right shot.
I remember I had everything down to a T. He goes to the counter.
He demands the fries.
The kids behind the counters are staring at the girls off camera.
This dude right here is the homie Sideshow.
If you didn’t know who he was, you’d think he was just a normal teenager.
But he’s like a super dope trap rapper from Louisiana.
These dudes in the video are all part of Anderson Paak’s Free National band.
He came late and so this guy was the lucky one that got to sit at the table.
He didn't know what was going on until we called action.
And then when he found out what he was doing he literally had this look on his face the
whole time.
Actually I called up my homegirl Dolly.
She’s like a super dope actress.
We wrote a couple lines, improv'd a few lines and kind of came up with this whole little
spiel between her as the escort and her date, the ATM.
She’s in the original video for NxWorries “Link Up” which is an Anderson Paak video.
That was the first time I met her and she is a dope actress.
She kills it every time.
We was like, that’d be crazy if you had like 6 arms.
It was based off this Salvador Dali photo.
He had 6 arms.
One hand was reading a book.
One hand was lighting a cigar.
We was like, we gotta do this somehow, someway.
So I thought, what’s like the ultimate ignorant thing that someone would do with unlimited
money?
They would definitely go to Tony’s Black Market and buy an arm and a leg and maybe
6 arms.
You know what I’m saying?
And get them all attached.
This scene was fun, man.
We just shot this obviously with like one arm, the forearm on top and then we actually
did another take with the green screen behind him.
And we just had him do a bunch of crazy stuff.
Some of the moves are you know, milly rock, the worm, just a bunch of weird dances.
We had our FX team go in and attach them to the body and make it legit.
The obvious thing is if you spend too much money, it’ll kill you.
But I think when we decided to put the ATM on top of Anderson, we wanted to represent
it’s not necessarily killing you, but it’ll fuck you up.
This one dude drove by, this one hood dude in like a Bronco bumping music pulled up and
he was like, “Man."
"That ain’t YG.”