Pharrell Williams and Morgan Neville attend the premiere of Piece by Piece at Princess of Wales Theatre on Sept. 10 in Toronto.Jemal Countess/Getty Images
Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville has an eye – and an ear – for unexpected treatments when making a biographical documentary. His recent film STEVE! (martin) a Documentary in 2 Pieces, for example, splits the life story of the iconic comedian in two distinct styles and chapters. But making a movie on the life of musical genius Pharrell Williams using Lego wasn’t even on his radar.
In a way, Neville was in good company – of master Lego builders who throw the instruction manual out when embarking on an ambitious project. The end result, which made its international debut last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, culminated in a piece of work that pushes the boundaries of making documentaries.
Neville, who was in Toronto for his film’s premiere, credited the multiple Grammy award-winning music producer and singer for challenging him to tell Williams’s life and legacy with Legos.
“He approached me and said, ‘I have a weird idea.’ I mean, what actually happened is that his agent called me and said, ‘Pharrell wants to pitch you an idea, but I’m not going to tell you what it is.’ [The producer] thought I would hang up on him or something. And I think there were a lot of people around Pharrell that were very skeptical about this idea,” says Neville. “When he pitched it to me, when he said Lego, I got very excited because I didn’t know what it was going to mean. But I knew it was going to be a whole idea to explore, and then we had to figure out – what’s the grammar of the film? How do you make a film like this?”
Review: Lego documentary Piece By Piece is a wonderfully inventive look at Pharrell Williams
Filmmaking wasn’t Neville’s first foray into storytelling. He started out as a journalist, working in New York and San Francisco. He was always a big fan of films, making Super 8 films when he was 12. But he also loved writing for his school newspaper – from grade school to college.
“At the time I was growing up, journalism was like a real career. I was a huge fan of new journalism and Joan Didion, and writers like that. Documentary felt impossible,” he says. “There was no clear path to even – how to do that.”
A few years into his journalism career, however, he had an idea to make a documentary about the history of Los Angeles, with Shotgun Freeway: Drives Through Lost L.A. becoming his debut feature.
“I thought it was going to take me a summer,” says Neville, grinning. “It took me three years. But two weeks into starting, I wrote to my parents and said, ‘I’m gonna do this for the rest of my life.’ I knew absolutely that documentary is perfect because it is journalism and it’s filmmaking and it’s writing. It’s all the stuff I like in one place.”
Neville created Tremolo Productions in 1999 and went on to produce Oscar, Grammy and Emmy Award-winning projects such as Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, 20 Feet From Stardom and Best of Enemies. Music documentaries hold a special interest for Neville, who describes himself as a “good enough musician to know that I was not a great musician.”
“I knew I wasn’t one of those touched by God, kind of player. I was a crazy music nerd, and record collector, and all that stuff. I realized I can make films about music if I can’t make my living being a musician,” he says.
Neville credited the multiple Grammy award-winning music producer and singer for challenging him to tell Williams’s life story with Legos.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
In fact, Neville starts each project with a playlist, just to think about the musicality of a project. When it came to making a documentary on Williams, a musical and creative genius, Neville ended up making multiple playlists. Having access to Pharrell’s prodigious catalogue of works, Neville thought about how songs reveal character and drive a story forward. Songwriters often end up telling their own story without even realizing it, he notes.
“So a song like God Bless Us All was written for a friend of his. It was like an advice song. And when he told me about their preacher who had been so influential … I just imagined the preacher telling young Pharrell this [advice],” says Neville.
Besides family members, friends and mentors from Williams’ early life, Piece By Piece also features interviews with artists such as Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg and Gwen Stefani, to name a few celebrities. Neville ended up conducting a series of interviews via Zoom, since the documentary got started just as the pandemic hit. He then used the interviews as a basis to animate the film via Lego, which allowed him to depict scenes such as Williams talking about synesthesia.
Documentary filmmaking usually offers little control, whereas animation offered him complete control.
“There was that friction I was always going with, whether it’s the hand-held camera that doesn’t get the right position. Or shots that sometimes are not finding focus,” he says, elaborating on how he told animators to incorporate blurry visuals in their storyboards, to their befuddlement.
“That’s me putting my documentary stamp on animation. But then the animation side was liberating too … And letting the music tell so much of the story. I love just having that kind of freedom.”