Piece by Piece: How Pharrell Williams’ Lego Doc Came to Be

This article appears in the new issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. You can read all of our magazine stories here.

Pharrell Williams is a legend. He’s one of the most influential artists of his generation, has had countless hits either as a performer or as a producer, has worked with an incredible roster of top music talent, won armfuls of awards, launched a fashion brand, and has even been nominated for two Oscars. And now he’s a Lego figure.

Director Morgan Neville has also won a boatload of awards, including an Oscar for the documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. He has a rich history with documentaries, often focusing on tales from the music industry, and now he, too, is a Lego figure. 

“I did not know Pharrell and it was his idea,” Neville laughs from the back of a car on the way to the airport when we ask about whose brainchild the Lego angle was. He’s surprisingly sprightly given it’s 5 a.m. for him, so you can see why that energy might have appealed to Pharrell. 

“The first meeting I had with him is not that dissimilar from what’s in the film,” Neville recalls. “I didn’t record our first conversation, but we reenacted it for the film. He explained it to me the first time, saying, ‘People wanted to make a documentary about me for a long time, and I’ve never been interested.’” It was only when Pharrell’s agent told him he could do it any way he wanted that it occurred to him to do it in Lego.

And so, Piece by Piece was born. 

It’s a strange and wonderful beast: an animated biopic charting Pharrell’s life; a colorful journey packed with music and flights of fancy. Starting with his upbringing in Virginia Beach, the film follows his gravitation toward music, his meeting and partnership with Chad Hugo and, later, Shay Haley, and his rise to stardom via production duo The Neptunes and band N.E.R.D.

“I’ve made a lot of music documentaries, and I think they work best when songs help drive the story,” says Neville. “So, a song like ‘God Bless Us All,’ which is the scene in the church, was a song Pharrell had written on an album about a friend of his. There was something gospel in the song, and I feel like this is the message that Pharrell got from his pastor growing up. So, I got Charlie Wilson from the Gap Band to re-sing it. The track is Pharrell’s track, but then we added a choir and Charlie Wilson singing it, and then it becomes this whole other thing. Pharrell wrote songs for the movie, too. It was a great opportunity to really let the songs help drive the narrative.”

Because of the nature of the film, there were a lot of moving parts. 

“I don’t know if anybody’s ever done a film like this,” Neville says. “We essentially made the film twice.” First, Neville shot a live-action documentary version of the film, complete with interviews. The talking heads in the movie are unsurprisingly stellar, with an eye-watering list that includes Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani, Timbaland, Snoop Dog, Daft Punk, Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, and more. But there’s also archival footage, clips from other movies, and moments of music history that were screened, edited, fine-tuned, and then sent over to the animation company. 

Neville says he thinks of it in terms of three “gears.” “One was a kind of direct documentary gear where we had handheld footage or archive footage, something that I just wanted to replicate one for one,” he explains. “Then, when people were telling stories, remembering things, it felt like people’s memories existed in a cinematic space. It’s an idealized version of how something happened. It’s like a movie scene. So I said, ‘Well, let those play cinematically.’ Later, when the music comes in, it plays fantastically, and anything can happen. So we go into outer space or underwater, whatever else.”

It frees up the documentary to really play within its visuals, with Pharrell swimming with giant fishes and communing with an enormous apparition of Neptune.

Fun fact: anything that’s animated in a Lego movie also has to be buildable. It’s a cute detail that actually proved to be a bit of a challenge for Piece by Piece. It was important to Pharrell and Neville to be able to represent a lot of different skin tones, characters, and hair styles. 

“I remember lengthy conversations about dreadlocks where we said, ‘Look, the dreadlocks on Pusha T should be thinner.’ They said, the problem is the dreadlock could break off, and a child could choke on it. And we said, ‘Yeah, but this is animated.’ They said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ We found a compromise but it was interesting.”

The biggest challenge of all though? Dancing. “Bricks aren’t flexible,” says Neville. “How much can a head wiggle on a non-existent neck? And how much can you suggest motion where there isn’t motion? That was one of the things we realized early.” 

In a movie full of dancing, they were fortunate to find a good workaround. During the section of the film that explores the phenomenon that was the song “Happy,” for example, where the video is packed with real people dancing to the song, the team were replicating real shots. “We had a guide of what we were going for, and then it was just, how far can we push it.” 

There are elements of musical, drama, comedy, and fantasy within the bricks of Piece by Piece, but Neville was keen not to lose the things that make documentaries special.

“Typically, in a Lego movie, your main character wears one or two outfits the entire movie—Pharrell has something like 62 outfits in the movie,” he explains. “In animation, you control the world. In documentary, the world controls you.” 

Piece by Piece opens in the UK on Oct. 20 and is out now in the US.