Early on in “Piece by Piece,” Morgan Neville’s unorthodox doc about one of popular music’s most influential figures, Pharrell Williams says that the best way to express himself is through Legos.
“I was given Lego sets as a child, and that was a really amazing platform for me to allow my imagination to flourish and to learn things about myself, as it has for most kids and a lot of people — millions and millions of people on this planet,” Williams told Variety at the Toronto Film Festival, where “Piece by Piece” made its international premiere.
While most documentaries rely on footage captured by the director, teaming with the toy company gave Williams and Co. a “cinematic liberty that wouldn’t otherwise exist.” He said making the Lego-animated documentary was an “unprecedented exercise.”
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The movie, out Oct. 11 via Focus Features and Universal Pictures, features talking-head interviews and narrative sequences with many of Williams’ closest collaborators over the years. Williams assembled an A-list roster of music stars for “Piece by Piece,” including Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Pusha-T and Timbaland. Only, he didn’t tell them they would appear in the film as Legos.
“We purposely did not tell anyone that that would be the finished product. We wanted people to just answer the questions and really give their full, unedited reactions to the opportunity to do the interviews,” Williams said. “Because if we would’ve said, ‘Okay, this is going to be in Lego,’ then people would have sort of curved what they were saying … we didn’t want them to be influenced by what we wanted. We wanted the purest part. And I feel like part of the magic of what makes this film pop the way it does is because it’s so vivid and it’s not scripted.”
Williams added that he didn’t want the film’s visual style, nor its PG rating and all-audience appeal, to affect the tone of the interviews.
“It would’ve started to have felt like, ‘Oh, we’re making this for kids.’ And it’s like, ‘No, we’re not. We’re making this for human beings,'” Williams said. “And while I am a Black man that comes from a marginalized community, we wanted this story to feel universal, and that was the reason why we told it through the guise of Lego.”
Williams said that once the documentary participants discovered that they would be animated as Legos, “everybody was pleasantly surprised and incredibly supportive.”
“This film, it’s a project that’s just been the sum of a lot of yeses. When you come from where I come from and you look like me, you hear a lot of noes,” Williams said. “But Morgan Neville said yes. Lego said yes. Focus said yes. Universal said yes. And the universe itself said yes. When people ask me about this project, I tell them, ‘Man, we’re working on the impossible.’ This is nearly impossible.”
Variety‘s Toronto Film Festival studio is sponsored by J.Crew and SharkNinja.
