For decades, Morgan Neville has been crafting noteworthy non-fiction films, often focussing on musicians’ creative processes. Beyond featuring stellar tunes and engaging interview subjects, Neville’s Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom (2013) provided a unique window into the vagaries of fame, asking insightful questions that revealed deep truths while exploring the careers of back-up singers who never quite made it to be famous. This was but one project of many—other subjects include Yo-Yo Ma, Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, Muddy Waters, and Bono and the Edge—that illustrate his uniquely honed gift for storytelling, crafting films that provide profound explorations beyond any pre-existing appreciation for their subjects.
So, it’s no surprise that he’s once again pushing at the limits of what documentary can do, taking up his subject Pharrell Williams’ challenge to use the idiom of a LEGO movie to delve into the singer and producer’s remarkable journey. While Piece by Piece is grounded in more traditional elements like interview and archival footage along with a smashing soundtrack, the visualizations of Pharrell’s triumphs and struggles are presented using a synesthetic symphony of colourful LEGO pieces. The near-infinite possibilities of assembling disparate parts in new and fascinating ways provides the most perfect metaphor for these endeavours, a gloriously experimental collision of form and content that makes for a truly ecstatic work that pushes the boundaries of documentary into a wonderful new space.
Neville’s half-decade-long process of bringing Pharrell’s story to life is finally ready for audiences, with an international premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) to be followed by a wide theatrical release—rare for a musical documentary. We spoke prior to the film’s premiere over Zoom about the process, the challenges, and piecing together Piece by Piece.
POV: Jason Gorber
MN: Morgan Neville
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: Can you talk about why you decided to radically change your method for this project?
MN: Because that’s what’s fun! With every project, I try to find some new creative challenge, and without this particular challenge, I don’t know if I would have done it. As soon as Pharrell said “LEGO,” I knew that this would be a mountain to climb, and I like climbing mountains. I don’t think anyone has ever made a film quite like this, with the hybridity of what we did, and that is something that I found incredibly invigorating creatively.
POV: The metaphor of using disparate bricks to assemble in near universal ways speaks to both the possibilities of filmmaking, but also the possibility of decision paralysis. Were you there to simply tell an artist’s story the way he wanted, or were you able to craft the film in ways you wanted?
MN: It took so many people to make this film, but I feel like I made every important decision, from what the story was going to be, to who I was going to talk to, to how I was going to cut it, to what songs I was going to use, to what I wanted the shots to look like, to where the camera was, to what the characters would look like, to how I wanted the score to work. I worked with a team of great people, but it was a shitload of work on my part.
POV: I think this is your most “directed” movie: the most articulate example of what you are able to do when you have the time to craft a film shot-by-shot.
MN: Totally. There were so many things that were liberating, and so many things that were the opposite. The things that were liberating were that I got to control how things looked in a way that when you’re shooting a documentary, you don’t get to decide. Normally, you don’t decide what the walls look like when you follow a subject into a room. What I realized is there’s a tremendous amount of exposition and context that you can give with visuals that you can’t in traditional documentary because you’re not controlling it to that level. I found when we started animating, I was able to take out more dialogue. I didn’t have to say things because you could see them.

The great part of documentaries is that there’s often a real freedom to it and a lack of control, it’s like creative surfing. With animation, you control everything. One of the biggest debates I had with the animators was that I didn’t want control over certain things. The animation people said it’s actually easier to make it perfect and then mess it up, and that’s such a different instinct. The randomness of the real world is in conflict with the precision of animation.
POV: Please take it as a compliment that about three quarters of the way in, I forgot it was a LEGO movie.
MN: That’s awesome.
POV: How did the process work of getting the pieces assembled?
MN: It was a mixture. I shot a few interviews in person, like Pharrell and his partner, Helen. Some people I Zoomed, and with other people I just had their audio. I worked with various animation studios. People have different skill levels and you’re trying to make it all cohere. If the performance wasn’t coming in right, we would actually record ourselves acting and send it to the animators to try to convey the emotion we were trying to get out of a scene.
I also used tons of film clips to suggest how I wanted scenes to look or feel. I was using clips from Any Given Sunday, Straight Outta Compton, Yellow Submarine, The Blues Brothers, and so on. One movie I used a lot and thought of as a North Star visually was Moonlight. It gave a sense of what I wanted a given scene to feel like. The scene of Pharrell’s grandmother dying, when he’s driving to the hospital, is like the end of Harold and Maude. It was such a grab bag of things to make this all fit together.
POV: Were you years into this project thinking, my god, what have I done?
MN: In the very beginning I thought, “This is a crazy idea, and I have no idea if this is going to work.” So as a proof of concept, both to sell the film but also to us, we did a 90-second full animation of a scene, the one where Pharrell listens to Stevie Wonder.
POV: The main synesthesia scene.
MN: Yeah. We animated it with Pharrell’s voice. As soon as we finished that, I had no doubt this was going to work.

It feels like we unlocked some new way of telling a story that is rooted in many things. On the one hand, it’s completely a documentary, but it’s also a musical, and a biopic, and an animated film. There’s a freedom to it, and as a filmmaker, with this source material, you can take so many different things. You can take audio interviews, music videos, film clips, storyboards, and once you animate it, it all becomes part of one world.
POV: It’s clear from the audio that sometimes disparate, naturalistic pieces are placed side by side with more formally recorded elements. This mix makes the metaphor of LEGO blocks of various shapes and characteristics for the building of a documentary even more resonant.
MN: Take the scene where Amy Valdez is interviewing Pharrell in the diner and we’re listening to the tape recording. You’re obviously listening to a real tape recording of a conversation. Visually, they’re sitting in a diner made up of LEGO blocks, yet while we’re watching it, you can tell, it’s an authentic recording. There’s another scene of Pharrell showing his apartment with his Dutch furniture and Galaga boxes. That’s all from old sources that I want to feel like real archive footage.
POV: When were the base elements locked before animation began?
MN: We soft locked the film before we animated a frame. I hired a kid out of art school, Ajamu Frasier, to draw storyboards for us in the edit bay. We incorporated archival footage and videos and everything else. Then we screened it for a small group of people to make sure it was working. We then revised and revised. The only things that changed as we animated was losing lines that we didn’t need and adjusting the timing a bit because of the visuals. Two years ago, we stopped editing the audio, and it was pretty much the film it is now.
POV: You’re so used to being deeply immersed in a project and then moving on to the next one. That must have been another major change.
MN: On the one hand, it was a steady stream… Well, less than a stream, more like a dribble! [Laughs.] Basically, every other day we would spend an hour and go through the animation shots we got or look over all of the designs that came in and approve them. There are 1583 shots in the film, and each one went through rounds. Every shot, we studied in detail more than 10 times, and it was 10 or 20 shots a day every day for two years. So, it wasn’t ever overwhelming since it took so long.

POV: Who was your direct collaborator on the animation front?
MN: Howard Baker was my interlocutor and spoke to the animation teams. He made a few big suggestions. It was his suggestion to physicalize the beats, making them visually a thing made up of pieces. He did a ton of work, but just to be clear, we did not hand it off and have somebody else animate it.
POV: Another reason LEGO is such a perfect tool to tell this tale is because much of beat-making, central to the story of both Pharrell’s output and hip hop culture, is a process taking pre-existing pieces and reassembling them in unique ways.
MN: In the beginning, Pharrell said: “I want to do a LEGO movie.” He didn’t tell me what his story was, and I had to find it. As I started to get to know him, and people who knew him, and saw how he worked, I started to see that it wasn’t just some gimmick. I started to see how into LEGO he was, and how as a producer, what he does is build songs out of pieces, as you’re saying. We started to riff on these blocks in our interviews, such as at the end of the film when he’s talking about how life is essentially a series of constructions that we make, and that we have agency over how we design our destiny. The metaphor kept getting deeper and richer, which was great. A common reaction from people who haven’t seen the film, which is most people, is: “Why the hell would you make this with LEGO?” And hopefully, when you come out of the film, it’s like, “Of course you would make this in LEGO.”
POV: A major part of Pharrell’s story is the “Blurred Lines” lawsuit, in which Marvin Gaye’s estate sued Williams and Robin Thicke for copying the “feeling” of Gaye’s music. Was something as complex as this case off limits?
MN: As somebody who works in non-fiction, I’ve been obsessed with copyright forever. And as somebody who’s made music films, I think that case is not only an important one, but it’s a terrible blow for creativity. I am not a fan of the precedent that case sets as a creative person. We talked about it, and Pharrell never said anything was off limits. We initially started to go there. I interviewed Robin Thicke, and a lot of people who aren’t in the film, too. But the moment I started to get into a conversation about copyright law, it was, like, “What the fuck are we doing?” That’s a discussion for a different film. Believe me, that’s not a dodge, as if I didn’t want to deal with a difficult subject. It was just that, tonally, it didn’t fit in the film in any way.
POV: It’s left in the bucket. It’s not a piece that fit what you were constructing.
MN: [Laughs.] So many biographical documentaries end up in this Wikipedia trap of checking boxes, and you have to talk about everything that they did. I love leaving out important things that people do! What I’m really focusing on is trying to find a story of what made this person special. This is a film about a creative person trying to find and stay on their path. I didn’t even get into the Louis Vuitton thing. Even Pharrell was like, “Shouldn’t we talk about the Louis Vuitton thing?” [Pharrell was named as the Men’s Creative Director of the storied fashion brand.] I was like, “No, that’s a different movie. This is a movie about you going home, not you going to Paris.”

POV: I love the connection between his synesthesia and the colourfulness that you bring to this film by setting it in LEGO. As someone who is not a baked-in fan of Pharrell or his music, the film makes me feel visually the way his music is working.
MN: It’s certainly the metaphor for his superpower. The film has a whole colour arc, and near the middle of the film when he ends up in outer space and under water, it suddenly becomes very desaturated. When Daft Punk show up to take him back to Earth, the colour comes back in a major way. Colour tells its own story in the film. In documentary, you don’t normally get to play with those gears to this extent.
POV: There are purists who may not think this qualifies as a documentary.
MN: I don’t care at all. I’m not the documentary police. I’m just trying to make great films. Let’s call this “creative non-fiction.” This film is truthful and soulful, but I’m not interested in arguing about the purity of it.
POV: You’re dealing with big personalities: Did any of them wish to reshape their performances after they were interviewed initially?
MN: Nobody saw their own performance. In fact, almost nobody even knew it was a LEGO movie! I had so much freedom creatively, but also journalistically. I didn’t change a single line in the film because of somebody complaining. Then again, nobody’s seen it yet.
We pitched it that we were doing an animated documentary—we just needed to do an audio interview. There were a handful who wanted to see how they were going to be represented. We didn’t show them the scenes. We just showed them their character design, and I think all of them were like, “Oh shit, this is a LEGO movie!” There were a few comments about what outfits they were going to wear.
POV: You’ve done a lot of films about the joy of music, and yet there’s a more overt joyfulness embedded in this telling.
MN: As a music lover and a musician, I’ve always been drawn to that spiritual part. I think about Keith Richards, who I’ve made a film about, for whom music is his spirituality, and I think I’m more in that camp. To me, it’s all part of a continuum.
POV: For me, this feels your most ecstatic expression of what music can bring. This time, you have all the tools to express music’s creativity.
MN: I think visually, I’m able to express it in a way that you just can’t do otherwise. Yes, ecstatic is a good term. I’m all for that.