When Pharrell Williams Asks You to Make a Documentary About Him Using Lego: Morgan Neville Chats 'Piece by Piece'

When Pharrell Williams first made contact with Morgan Neville, the Oscar-winning documentarian behind 20 Feet From Stardom, their conversation could've started like this: "it might seem crazy what I'm 'bout to say". The famed producer, N.E.R.D. co-founder, 'Happy' singer, and Daft Punk and Snoop Dogg collaborator's proposal to the filmmaker also behind the Mr Rogers-focused Won't You Be My Neighbour?, then Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain and STEVE! (martin): a Documentary in 2 Pieces, was for Neville to tell Williams' life story — a request that doesn't seem out of the ordinary. But Pharrell wanted this journey through his upbringing in Virginia Beach in Virginia, his music dreams as a kid and a teenager, and then the ups and downs of his career to solely be relayed using Lego animation.

How do you explore anyone's existence, let alone someone so influential in music for decades, while rendering them, other interviewees and everything else that's seen on-screen only in the style of The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie, The Lego Ninjago Movie and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part? Just as importantly, why would you? Piece by Piece, the film that results, sits alongside Brett Morgen's David Bowie-adoring Moonage Daydream as recent music docos that know how to expertly takes their cues for their approach, aesthetic and vibe from their subject. In both cases, it's instantly apparent that any other method wouldn't have done the folks at their centre justice.

Piece by Piece boasts the childhood details, the stories shared by loved ones and colleagues, the glimpses into the studio and the examples of Pharrell's work, his music and the videos that go with them alike. As the movie's title states so clearly, however, they have all been built piece by piece in Lego animation. This effectively meant making the film twice, first featuring the raw materials, including chats with Williams, his N.E.R.D. bandmates Shae Haley and Chad Hugo, his distant cousin Timbaland, fellow Virginia Beach residents Pusha T and Missy Elliott, and then everyone from Daft Punk and Snoop to Gwen Stefani and Kendrick Lamar — and secondly with that initial cut, which Neville dubs the "radio edit", animated frame by frame in the Lego fashion.

Spliced into the initial version were storyboards for scenes that simply wouldn't have been possible to realise without Piece by Piece's unconventional biodoc technique, many of which bring Pharrell's synesthesia to the screen. Music appears to him as colours, and shapes as well. The film not only recreates that sensation for the audience, but does so with exacting detail: when the beats that Pharrell creates appear as pulsating bricks, be it for N.E.R.D's 'Rock Star' or No Doubt's 'Hella Good', or for Snoop Dogg's 'Drop It Like It's Hot' or Williams' own mega hit from the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack — and much more — the forms and hues depicted are exactly what Pharrell sees.

In every piece, frame and moment, this is a documentary that's intimately in tune with its subject, then. It celebrates a dreamer by crafting those dreams out of bricks. Yes, it all clicks. It's an ode to creativity and imagination, too, right down to deploying one of the first formats that almost every child uses to make new worlds, because that's what Lego lets us do. While there are tie-in kits available for sale, as happens with Lego-based movies, the medium matches the man perfectly. Indeed, that's so accurate that the feature wouldn't have happened otherwise, including if Lego hadn't be on board with the idea, Neville told Concrete Playground.

"We'd thought about it, whether there were other ways of doing it if Lego said no. And I think we all agreed if Lego said no, there was going to be no film," the director shares. "It just felt like Lego itself was actually an important piece, as it were, of what the film was — that it wasn't just a gimmick, that it actually felt part of who Pharrell is in his story and how he sees the world."

We also chatted with Neville about how you respond when Pharrell asks you to make a movie about him using Lego — a version of which is seen in the film — plus creating a type of music documentary that hasn't been made before, the added possibilities that come with examining someone's life and career in Lego, heroing creativity, his starting point whether he's making docos about Williams or Bourdain or Martin, and more.

On How You React When Pharrell Suggests That Lego Would Be the Perfect Medium to Tell His Story 

"What happens in the film is a version of what happened in real life. But that was the one moment that I didn't actually record, because the first time I met Pharrell, he pitched me on this idea where he said 'I want you to make a movie about me, and then I want you to throw away all the visuals and do it again in Lego'. And honestly, when he said that I was totally hooked. 

So that's the difference. I think in the movie I'm a little unsure, but I think in real life I jumped right into it. That was the thing that got me incredibly excited, because I didn't know what it was going to mean. 

It was a crazy idea, but I love crazy ideas."

On Making a Type a Music Documentary That Hasn't Been Made Before — and Whether It Feels Daunting, Freeing or a Bit of Both

"I feel like being a film director, there's a kind of wilful amnesia that you have, where you intentionally forget how difficult it is to make films. Because if you remembered, you wouldn't make them.

So I vaguely knew that this was going to be climbing a mountain, but I really just looked at this path in front of me and said 'well, this is interesting. What if I do this, and what if I think about this? And, well, let's talk to Lego. They could kill it. It might go away'.

We talked to Lego and they said 'we love it'. And then we just kept trying things. And so step by step it came together, but it was five years of work to get there."

On How Using Lego Allowed the Film to Explore and Expand Areas and Details That Wouldn't Have Been Possible Otherwise — or in Such an Evocative Way

"That was the amazing realisation I came to early on, was that because of the Lego, we could do things you can't normally do — you certainly couldn't do in a documentary and you couldn't do in a lot of films — which is visualise imagination, or visualise things in somebody's head. And so the synesthesia was an important thing because Pharrell sees colour when he hears sound. We wanted to get that right. 

We actually brought in Michel Gagné, who's a famous animator, who had done the synesthesia in Ratatouille, to work on this — to think 'how do you do synesthesia, but in Lego?'.

But then also the idea that we can visualise beats — the beats that Pharrell has made are physical Lego objects. And every beat in the film is actually reflective of how Pharrell sees that song. So the colours and the shapes of the beats in the film are accurate to what Pharrell sees in his head, even though nobody else knows what that is. 

Every song, we're like 'Pharrell, okay what are the colours? How does this look?'. Because it's interesting, he has a library in his head of every song you mention, he'll tell you what the colours are of that.

So things like that you could do in Lego, which I don't know how else you would do that."

On the Importance of Connecting Celebrating Creativity and Imagination with One of the First Gateways to Unlocking Both for Children

"I think many people, most people, probably grew up with some connection to Lego toys. I did. I was of the era where when I bought a set of Lego, you would just get a big box of pieces. There were no instructions, it was just 'okay, make whatever you want'. I always ended up with a big tub of random pieces and you would just make stuff.

I think Pharrell, also Lego he said was a really important toy his parents would give him when he was young. And it's interesting how much it comes up in the creative community. I've talked to architects and artists and designers, and Lego actually is kind of a building block of creativity. It's this thing that I think is just pure imagination in that way.

And so imagination is a huge theme of the film. I love making films about creative people and how they think, and Lego just felt like this perfect way of exploring that. And the idea that it was Pharrell's conceit makes it even more organic to why it works in this film."

On Neville's Starting Point When He's Making a Documentary, No Matter Who or What His Subject Is

"My starting point on every project, I do a couple of things. I start a playlist of music. So for every film, I have a playlist of music, even if it's not about music. I'm a musician and I've made a lot of films about music, and it helps me get a feel for the tone of what a film could be. 

In this case I had like ten playlists, because Pharrell had done so much music. So I had solo work and produced by, and with the bands he had done and influenced music. And I spent months listening to all of it, waiting for songs to pop out and for me to hear them and say 'oh, I could see this, it feels like this song belongs in a scene' or 'this song has a theme that could work to the story'. So that's a big part of it.

Then I gather visuals and references, and all that kind of stuff. So all that just goes into a pod as I start to conceive of what this film might be. But I think all that other stuff, tone and aesthetic, are all things I'm thinking about in the beginning.

And then I just talk as much as I can to the subject or other people. I just am trying to take in as much input as I can get. Then it starts to form in my head and little things start coming together."

On the Difficult Task of Knowing What to Include and Leave Out When You're Making a Film About Someone with Such a Wide-Ranging Career

"It always is. This was difficult because Pharrell has done so much, but I always think about it more like 'what are the things that influenced his life?'. I mean, a big part of this movie is his childhood, which was a huge part of what made him who he is. But it's not his career.

So in that way, the career stuff, he had so many more hits that aren't even in the film. He's done so much. But to me it's about the moments where things turn. It's where maybe a failure — failures are as interesting as successes when it comes to looking at a narrative of a person's life, because that's where we learn.

So I think it was really identifying the moments where something felt different, or where he learned something, or where something clicked or didn't click. 

I always try to avoid what I think of as 'the Wikipedia version' of a person's life, because it's not that interesting to just go through everything they accomplished. But to hit the moments that actually meant something to them, that were part of their personal growth or their creative growth, that's what I try to zero in on, and so that helps me cut stuff out unfortunately."

Piece by Piece opened in Australian cinemas on Thursday, December 5, 2024.

Images: courtesy of Focus Features / © 2024 FOCUS FEATURES LLC.