There’s a heavy scene in the Snoop doc Reincarnated in which no less than Bunny Wailer questions the sincerity of the rapper’s visit to Jamaica. Besides one kid under the influence of overproof rum in the poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Tivoli Gardens, Wailer—who was ultimately impressed enough to make an appearance on the album Snoop recorded in Kingston—was one of the few people who treated him with some apprehension. “The guy in Tivoli Gardens was just drunk and wanted some attention,” says Brit filmmaker Andy Capper, calling the Georgia Straight from Monterrey, Mexico. “But Bunny, I think, treats everybody with a bit of skepticism because he’s been around for 50 years. The most skepticism has come from, like, the western press. But not the people in Jamaica and the people we made the record with.”

Indeed, as Capper depicts in his unexpectedly moving film, it was Wailer who took the man born as Calvin Broadus, Jr., punted the Dogg, and renamed him Snoop Lion—all part of a conversion to Rastafari that even Snoop himself didn’t see coming. “His main plan was just to go to Jamaica to make a record,” Capper says. “So my job was to bring to the table some things that we could put in there to make it more than just an album movie. So we came up with the Alpha Boys School and Tivoli Gardens, and then the Niyabinghi temple was the big thing for us.” All three of those locations—there’s also a visit to Marley turf in Trenchtown—retain a fabled position inside both the Rastafarian imagination and the history of reggae. Snoop’s up-close encounter has a visible impact. “He was really out there amongst the people of that country,” Capper notes, “and I feel like he saw a lot of things that affected him. The poverty was big for him. The Rasta thing, how deep and heavy it was, he has a newfound respect for that.”

Besides making a genre-bending album of the same name with Diplo and other collaborators, the presence of Capper’s cameras also encouraged the Lion to reflect in riveting detail on his past, from troubled youth to Tupac Shakur’s death and beyond. “I couldn’t believe the pimp stuff he was telling me,” Capper says. “There was 160 girls on his books. It was bananas!” As for the Death Row years, the filmmaker knew he’d really cracked his subject in a sit-down interview conducted when everybody returned to California. “As soon as I got permission to do the film, I was, like, ‘Right, I’m gonna make this about his life story,’ ” he says. “I was a huge fan, so I always wanted to know. I’d never really seen Snoop’s take on Tupac. Especially not what happened the day he died.” Snoop even possibly concedes a bit too much information. In Capper’s words, he’s “a risk taker”, but for us it’s spellbinding stuff, straight from the Lion’s mouth.

Georgia Straight, March 2013