Piece by Piece Director Morgan Neville Reveals How Pharrell and LEGO Changed His Career

With this weekend's release of Focus Feature's Piece by Piece –– the Pharrell Williams biographical documentary about his journey from humble obscurity to globally recognized singer, songwriter, producer, fashion designer, and The Voice Coach –– there's been a lot of chatter about the fact that it's been created as a feature length LEGO animation.

If you're aware of any part of Pharrell's eclectic career and life, that format choice is not such a surprise. However, the fact that Academy Award-winning documentary director Morgan Neville signed on, and plays himself in minifig form, is a much bigger surprise.

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A 2014 Oscar winner for his documentary film 20 Feet from Stardom, and director of recent hits like Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain and the Mr. Rogers doc, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, Neville has only really dipped into animation with the short Peanuts in Space: Secrets of Apollo 10. But the combination of telling Pharrell's story in a medium so dynamic and a format so unfamiliar got his mind activated to say, "Yes!"

Neville recently sat down with NBC Insider to explain how he got involved with Pharrell, why the normally only-heard-but-never-seen director is a character in the film, and how this film has changed him for good. 

Piece by Piece director Morgan Neville admits he was "burnt out" on music docs

Pharrell Williams stars in director Morgan Neville’s 'Piece by Piece'. Photo: Courtesy of Focus Features

Neville started working in the non-fiction space in 1995, but really made his first big impression in the music doc genre with 1999's Brian Wilson: A Beach Boy's Tale. He's subsequently done many more doc features on music icons from Johnny Cash to Keith Richards to Bono and The Edge of U2.

However, Neville told NBC Insider that he's recently been moving away from musical subjects. "I honestly wasn't looking to do another music film. I've made so many music films that I was kind of burnt out on it. But when Pharrell said, 'LEGO,' that was the hook for me. I had no idea what that was going to mean, but I was really excited to try and figure that out. At this point in my career, I got excited about trying to figure out a whole different type of storytelling here and see what happens."

Piece by Piece was actually made twice

Pharrell Williams stars in director Morgan Neville’s 'Piece by Piece'. Photo: Courtesy of Focus Features

While the cast and sets of Piece by Piece are all LEGO, the film is actually made like a traditional documentary featuring talking heads, recreations of the past, and even visits to where Pharrell started out in Virginia Beach, Virginia. 

Neville said that the film started production in 2020 much like any of his other films, just with the disruption of the pandemic. "I ended up doing almost all the interviews from my couch at home during the pandemic, sometimes on Zoom, which I would record, or sometimes just phone calls that I would have a sound person record from their home studio," he explained. "But I did film some things too. We did go to Virginia Beach with Pharrell. I interviewed him on camera. I interviewed Helen [Pharrell's wife] on camera. I interviewed his parents on camera. And then we had archive footage."

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The next stage was to edit all of the interviews together with the inclusion of rough animated sequences that would fill in everything else. "I hired a kid out of art school to just draw in the edit for us all the time," he said. "Like, there's this idea that Pharrell's going to go into this water storm, so just draw this. I also pulled movie clips from movies that were kind of references for how I wanted scenes to feel. So there's a version of the film that's completely like that, with no animation. We screened it for people and we refined it, and it worked. We said if people can watch this film and it works and there's no animation, then that's a good foundation. And it was a process that we just made up. There was no rule book for how do you make a film like this? So we kind of made it twice."

How Morgan Neville ended up as a character in Piece by Piece

In the trailer, Neville and Pharrell open the film with the musician's pitch to tell his story in LEGO, with the director's incredulous reaction. In truth, Neville said that his reaction as a LEGO director is the only part of the finished film that's not entirely accurate. 

"That first conversation I had with Pharrell I didn't record because there was no film, and it's weird to show up to record somebody when you first meet them," he chuckled. "My [first] reaction was that I was hooked kind of instantly. But I thought it was a little bit funnier for me, almost as an audience surrogate, to be a little skeptical in the film." 

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As they put the film together, Neville said they recorded an approximation of their first conversation to be able to animate that scene. "I was like, 'Can we just play around with that first conversation in time, and we'll just talk about it. Give me your pitch,' and that's how that first scene got made."

With Piece by Piece now complete and getting great critical and audience reactions, Neville admitted that the film changed him as a storyteller. 

"I think I probably grew more on this film than any film I've ever done," he shared. "I just felt like we kept opening doors going, 'Can we get away with this?' And we were like, 'Oh, this works. We we can do more!' And so I felt like it was liberating in a way, and definitely whets my appetite to do a whole bunch of different kind of things. Animation being one, but also just thinking about different gears for non-fiction storytelling is always interesting to me. Without a doubt, I came out of this hugely inspired."

Piece by Piece opens in theaters Friday, October 11. Tickets are available now at Fandango!