by James Mottram
When the iconic musician/producer Pharrell Williams came to director Morgan Neville to discuss making a movie about his life, it was never going to be just another documentary.
“What he said to me initially was, ‘Why don’t you make a documentary, and then when you’re done, throw out all the images and just replace them with LEGO?’”
At this point, your reaction is likely ‘WTF?!’ But that’s exactly what Piece by Piece is; a music documentary designed in LEGO form.
“I think it was almost like a dare,” adds Neville. “Like, ‘If you want me to try and do a documentary, then I want to do it in some different way’. He has four young children. I think he plays with LEGOs with his kids. And I think he wanted to make a film that spoke to his kids too, about his story.”
Can it work for kids, though? “I’ve seen, like, 10-year-olds totally get into it. So, it’s not necessarily a six-year-old’s movie, but I think it can work for younger kids… I will say that my 17-year-old son, who normally could care less about my work, loves this movie. So, I got the 17-year-old audience!”
Like nothing you’ve seen before, Piece by Piece arguably reinvents what is possible in documentary, as it recounts the life of Pharrell, the man who among many things made global hit ‘Happy’. “I felt so liberated to play between these gears in a different way,” says Neville (20 Feet from Stardom). “And the whole time we were making the film, I kept feeling like we were getting away with something, like we’re opening a door… like, ‘Oh, wait, we could do this. This is possible, and we could try this’. There’s a lot of discovery in the process.”
A talking heads doc, with Pharrell recounting his life story and joined on camera by a phalanx of celebrity collaborators, the footage has been entirely animated in LEGO form, much in the way The LEGO Movie and its spin-offs appear. “LEGO, to their ultimate credit, when we pitched them this, they said, ‘This is definitely not what we would normally do, but we love this and we understand it’s going to push us in ways that are probably good for us’,” notes Neville.
Working with the animation studio Pure Imagination, Neville knew that the film had to fit into the familiar brick-based world. “We all wanted it to have the feel of The LEGO Movie and live in that universe. LEGO has a bible of rules about what you can do in LEGO movies. One of the big rules is, anything in the movie has to be buildable. You can invent pieces that haven’t been made, but they have to be manufacturable.”
The director reports that they had “many crazy conversations” about what might be possible. “We pushed them on skin tones for different types of black, Filipino, Asian skin tones, hairstyles, braids, Caesar cuts, dreads, all these things that they hadn’t really done before, and that was super important to Pharrell at the beginning, but I think that was something we pushed them on.”
But what about the likes of Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg, not to mention the publicity-shy French duo Daft Punk [above], who all make appearances in the film? “I mean, there was so much love and trust in Pharrell, that getting people to talk was not hard…[initially] we just told people we were making an animated documentary. And everybody said, ‘Fine’. A few people, just because they’re big stars, said, ‘Can we just see our character before it goes out the door?’ Two years later, we showed them their character, and the response was great. They’re like, ‘Oh, I see what you’re doing’.”
With the film in production during the COVID-19 pandemic, it meant that many celebrities were stuck at home, and interviews were conducted over Zoom. “I ended up doing these interviews at odd times… like I remember with Jay Z, they said ‘He’s going to call you this week’. And one night at nine o’clock at night after dinner, I get a call saying, ‘Yeah, Jay Z wants to talk to you now’. So, we did it then. But there’s something about doing audio interviews or Zoom interviews that can feel more intimate than having a film crew there.”
With Pharrell, Neville spoke to him face-to-face, as well as over video. While the musician even gets emotional at points, what was it like for Neville to document him? “I feel like Pharrell’s whole career, really, as a producer, is holding up mirrors to artists and trying to get them to be creative and vulnerable and all these things, but he’s always more comfortable a little bit as the wizard, right? Behind the curtain. And so, my job is to hold a big mirror up to him. And I know that’s not his comfortable space, but he got it. He got that that’s what I needed.”
One of the most intriguing revelations is that Pharrell was overwhelmed by the response to his mega-hit ‘Happy’. “It’s something I hadn’t anticipated, but it totally made sense when he explained it, that it’s a song that people hang on to because they need to feel happy, and it’s that undercurrent that is so heavy to process. I mean, it’s just the kind of thing that you don’t think about when you write a song like that. But the legacy of a song like that is something that is not superficial. It becomes the opposite. It becomes something that’s meaningful to people because it helps them cope.”
Intriguingly, Neville’s career has seen him chronicle American icons before, notably wholesome TV personality Fred Rogers in the 2018 documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? “There is a little bit of Mr. Rogers in Pharrell!” he says. “A kind of empathetic and gentle soul. But I think when I try and look back at all the stuff I keep being drawn to, there are a few things, but one of them is just creative people exploring how they find their voice and what they do with their creativity. I mean, those kinds of things I find endlessly fascinating. I love… figuring out how people come to terms with their own creative abilities.”
Piece by Piece is in cinemas 5 December 2024
