Featuring a star-studded cast of music super stars like Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, and Justin Timberlake, PIECE BY PIECE is an inspiring autobiographical story of Pharrell’s journey from outcast kid who embraced his individuality to one of the most powerful artists in the music industry, all told through the unique and imaginative world of LEGOs.
As Piece By Piece hits Australian cinemas on December 5, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the unique documentary’s director, Morgan Neville, about how he got so many celebrities to be a part of his Lego movie, and the conversations he had with Pharrell about animating important aspects of his life.
Nick: Hey, Morgan! It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking the time to chat.
Morgan Neville: Hi! Nice to meet you.
Nick: This documentary was so fantastic and fascinating. As someone who was aware of Pharrell, but did not know a whole lot about his story, it made sense almost immediately that it was one to be told via Lego animation. And the biggest element that really made that stand out was the depiction of his synaesthesia. I’m curious to know what the conversations with Pharell were like when it came to him describing that to you, and then the process of bringing it to life in a visual sense.
Morgan Neville: It was my very first conversation with Pharrell. I mean, once we decided to make this film, I sat down with a tape recorded, we talked about synaesthesia, and he talked about that experience of being a boy and sitting in front of his stereo, in his parents living room, and listening to records that would come to life. For him, those colours came out of the speakers, you know?
And he would talk about the songs that really triggered it. Songs like Stevie Wonder songs, or the Jacksons, even Steely Dan. He told me that whole story, and the first thing we did making the film, is I cut together a bit of that interview, and we did a little sample test to see if this idea of doing a Lego film was going to even work.
That test is the scene of him sitting there, that’s in the film. Him listening to music, listening to Stevie Wonder. And we redid the animation, but it’s basically the same idea. That moment of visualising the synaesthesia was kind of the idea that led to, ‘Oh, this is really going to work.’ And for me, who comes from documentary, you don’t normally have the ability to visualise something in somebody’s imagination in that way. So, that was so liberating, and that was the thing that got everyone excited about making this film, because it was an unusual idea to do something like this.
Nick: It is unusual and unique, for sure. And I noticed that the documentary style, with things like handheld camera movements, zooms, or rack focuses, seemed purposefully animated into the film to give it that authentic feel. I especially noticed it in the scene where Pharrell returns to his childhood home. How many of those ‘documentary-isms’ are conscious decisions that you had to animate?
Morgan Neville: So, here’s what’s interesting, that scene, I shot that scene, and the real shots look the exact same way in real life as they do in animation. So, there are things I shot that are just literally translated, one-to-one, from real life to animation. And then there are many things we made up and constructed.
But it was one of the big debates we had, because in animation, the director is God. You can make anything happen. And in documentary, the director has so little power. You don’t always get the shot, or the camera may not focus right. All the mistakes, all the frictions of reality. I kept saying to the animators, when we started working on it, that it’s all gotta be handheld, and we’ve gotta work with all these mistakes and keep them in. They couldn’t really understand what I was getting at. It took a few months for them to finally get it, because it kind of had to be “wrong”. By being wrong, it’s gonna feel authentic, you know? And that was kind of inconceivable to them.
We had so many discussions about the handheld, and even when we started doing the handheld tests, it was still all too smooth! So, I would shoot reference videos on my iPhone or send them reference clips to just try and get the grammar of the film right. And what was interesting to me was I didn’t know how it was going to work, because the film has that gear to feel like a documentary, but then it has this fantasy gear. The reality in this Lego world disappears. We can be underwater. We can be outer space. We can do all of this stuff!
And the happy accident, or the design of it, was that you don’t notice when it goes from one gear to another. Suddenly, it can be realistic, and then it can suddenly be somebody floating, because it’s all in Lego. You just go with it.
Nick: Did you pitch to all the people who were interviewed in this film that this was going to be a Lego movie documentary? And who had the best reaction to seeing themselves as Lego for the first time?
Morgan Neville: Nobody knew we were doing a Lego movie! We started the project before the pandemic started. And first of all, everyone loves Pharell. All the collaborators, everybody, said yes. It was actually far easier than I could have imagined, considering how famous some of these people are! And we had to do some of them remotely on Zoom, or on the telephone. But we just pitched it as a documentary, but we’re going to animate it. And we didn’t say what we were going to do.
I mean, I did tell a couple of people, because the first interview I did was Missy Elliot. And this was at the beginning of the pandemic, and I couldn’t even send a sound person to her house. So, I FedEx’d her a Zoom audio recorder, and had to talk her through how to record herself. So, here is me, producing Missy Elliot, trying to get her to do this. And I remember her dog coming in and barking, and she asked if her dog was going to be in Lego! I wish I’d gotten her dog in Lego!
But most people didn’t really know. We knew this was gonna take years, and we just didn’t want people to have that in their head. So then, when we showed people their designs, they were universally positive, you know? I mean, it could have gone a different way. But I feel like, who doesn’t want to see themselves in Lego? Like, myself included! It’s fun to see yourself as a mini figure.
Nick: That must have been such a cool experience to visualise yourself as Lego! We’re almost out of time, Morgan, so I’d love to close with the fact that you’ve made many incredible documentaries about many amazing people. How often are you, as a filmmaker, inspired by the people you make documentaries about?
Morgan Neville: I mean, it’s a lot of the reason why I make films about creative people. These are things I’m trying to explore as a creative person. I feel like the questions I ask, and often the questions of the movies, are questions about creativity, and how do you navigate a creative life and stay in touch with the creative instinct? And deal with a world that doesn’t always honour and respect those things?
In a way, even though I’ve made a lot of films about people’s biographies, I feel like there’s a lot of autobiography in everything. I feel like I see myself in all of these questions. When I’m making something, I often say the instructions are in the box, meaning if we’re trying to figure out how to make a film, we just listen to what the subject is saying. So, listening to Pharrell talking about this kind of magical realism, or making no’s into yes’s, and all of these ideas, that is how we should make the film. The film really, in it’s texture, is reflective of Pharrell’s creative vision, and that was amazing.
Thank you so much to Morgan for his time, and to Universal Pictures for organising the interview. Piece By Piece is in Australian cinemas December 5.
