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Oscar winner Morgan Neville on Pharrell Williams Lego biopic Piece By Piece

Morgan Neville, the Academy Award winning director behind such films as 20 Feet From Stardom, Best of Enemies and numerous music related works detailing the lives of among others Johnny Cash, Brian Wilson and Keith Richards, joins Headliner to discuss the making of his new film Piece By Piece, which tells the life story of pop icon Pharrell Williams through the medium of Lego animation.

Made over the course of five years, Piece By Piece is a genre-defying project the brings together elements of biopic and traditional documentary filmmaking and merges them with a bold and vivid aesthetic to create a music film unlike any other. Through interviews with Williams himself, as well as stars such as Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake and more, it tells the story of Williams life and career to date.

For Neville, whose vast and varied career has involved numerous acclaimed music-themed projects, Piece By Piece provided a novel opportunity to take a format with which he is supremely well-versed and approach it from an entirely new angle.

Here, he joins Headliner for an insightful discussion on how the project came together, the technical challenges it posed, and working with Williams to bring the artist’s distinct vision to life…

Hi Morgan. How are you and whereabouts are you joining us from?

I'm good, I'm in London. Just last night we had the closing night gala screening at the London Film Festival and there were 2,200 people there. It was the biggest screening I've had in my entire life.

How was the evening?

When you're working on a film for five years and you're lost in the jungle of making it, nights like last night make it feel worth it. You're like, ‘Oh, this is why we did it’. To get all those people together and to have that shared experience of cinema on a big screen. The emotion that came out of the crowd was everything I was hoping for.

How have people been responding to the film? It's such a unique and imaginative take on the music documentary format

It's been great but it's not really a music documentary. The biggest revelation is that people are bringing their 10-year-olds who have no idea who Pharrell Williams is. They might know Happy but it connects with them in a way that I didn't realize it would. I think the film is about how you hang on to your uniqueness and how that becomes a source of strength. It asks a lot of questions, and a lot of people come out saying they're inspired, and that makes me very happy.

What was it that first drew you to making music films?

I mean, it's kind of crazy, but I feel like everything I do I've been into since I was 12 [laughs]. My dad was a big music nut, and we had a jukebox in our house, and I played in bands for forever. I just love music. I read tons of music books, and I'll watch every music documentary, so I've always loved what music can do. I love the connection between music and film. Music is such a great way of conveying emotion in a way that you can't articulate, and film speaks the same kind of emotional language. It creates an empathetic bond that is kind of mysterious.

This was a way of sharing his experiences in a way that was translatable. Morgan Neville

Were there any music documentaries or films that left an early impression on you?

So many things. I was a big Beatles fan, so I loved Hard Day's Night. Then things like Stop Making Sense - I'm a big Talking Heads fan. But back then the idea of being a musical documentarian was like being an alien. Like, how does that happen? I didn't even know that was a thing you could be.

So how did you become one?

I worked as a journalist for a few years, but I was always obsessed with film and documentary. I had an idea to make my first film, which was kind of a crazy LA history documentary called Shotgun Freeway and I thought it would take me three months and it took me two years. Then very quickly I decided I wanted to start doing music films. So, I called up one of my favourite music writers, Peter Guralnick, and I said, ‘Are there any documentaries you want to make’? And he said, ‘There are two - one is about songwriter Doc Pomus and the other is about Sam Phillips who started Sun Records’. I said I could maybe find money to make a Sam Phillips documentary, and next thing I knew, I moved to Memphis for a while and Peter and I did a documentary about Sam (Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock’n’Roll). That was a transformative experience for me, and I actually brought that film here to London in 2000 with Sam who had never been outside of the United States before, amazingly enough. He came over and had an incredible time.

Moving forward to Piece By Piece, how did this project and the idea of incorporating Lego animation come together?

Five-and-a-half years ago, I got a call saying Pharrell wants to meet with you about something but I'm not going to tell you what it is. Turns out the agent knew what it was, but Pharrell wanted to tell me himself, so I met with him in a studio and he said, ‘I have been reluctant to tell my story, but I have an idea and I want you to tell it’. He said he wanted me to make a documentary, but when I’m finished, throw out the visuals and do it again in Lego. When he said that I got very excited because it was a crazy idea, and crazy ideas are the best ideas. It was literally a 15-minute conversation.

Then it was about how we were going to do it. We talked about what it could be. Pharrell really had no idea what the story was going to be exactly, he just told me to figure it out. He gave me complete license to pick all the music, work out the story, do it as I wanted to do it. I realized that what I should do is something that's part documentary but also part musical. Animation can teleport you through time and space in a way that documentary can't, so I wanted to take advantage of that. I could live more in Pharrell's imagination than I ever could otherwise, so it became incredibly exciting.

Pharrell has synaesthesia, which means he sees colour when he hears sound, and the idea that we could visualize that became really exciting and fun. It just gave us so much opportunity to invent things and we came up with a film that I don’t think has a genre! But it makes sense when you see it.

Did he elaborate on why he specifically wanted to tell the story through Lego animation?

There are many reasons, but the first reason he articulated in that meeting was that he was approaching 50 and he wanted to communicate what he’d learned in a way that his children will understand. And this felt like a way of sharing his experiences in a way that was translatable. There's a universality to the storytelling of Lego where I feel like people project themselves into the medium a little bit. There's something immediately charming about it. I feel like even if you were not remotely interested in the music of Pharrell Williams, the whole idea of a film like this comes with a nostalgia and relatability that draws you in.

It was a crazy idea, and crazy ideas are the best. Morgan Neville

How did you go about bringing this idea to life from a technical perspective?

We kind of made it up as we went along. I'll do interviews with people, and I'll talk to Pharrell, I'll get all the archive footage like you would in a documentary, and I started to put that together. I also hired a kid who had just graduated from art school to just draw for us, so we created this Frankenstein edit of the film. Then we went to the animation studio and started working with them - we went back to the beginning, started storyboarding, and then did a couple of years of animation on it. So, we made the film twice in a way.

The first version took about as long as it would have taken a normal documentary to make. It was two years of work to get there, and then we had to start again. I knew animation was hard, but I didn't realize how hard animation is. Because, on the one hand, there's tremendous freedom but there's such complexity, as the process solidifies in a way where it gets very hard to move backwards. You have to start thinking multiple steps ahead to make sure it all works. I learned so much about animation, and I also learned that the way animators work is the opposite of how documentarians work. With animation you have such control and such freedom, and with a documentary you have so little control, and I wanted to get those two things to work together: to keep the grammar of non-fiction in animation.

How involved was Pharrell during the process?

He didn't see anything for a couple of years. I basically structured the whole film and picked all the music, but I knew I wanted him to write a song for the end of the movie. We had talked about that from the beginning, so I showed him the film after about two years and his first reaction was, ‘Oh you picked that song’? I was taking songs that he wrote in one context and using it in a totally different context. I think it was blowing his mind and then he was like, ‘I kind of love it’. Then he wrote the song Piece By Piece for the end of the film, which I think is great. He got really inspired and kept sending me songs, so he ended up writing five different songs for the film.

The other thing he said he cared a lot about was the representation of the characters, from the outfits and, in particular, the skin tones. The skin tones and hair were more diverse than what Lego had on offer, and that was something we talked about from the beginning. We pushed to develop several new skin tones and hairstyles, like dreadlocks and braids, things Lego had never really done before. It was good because we had these conversations with Lego and they were they were great about. Pharrell really took the lead on that.

Piece By Piece is out now in the US and released in the UK on November 8.

Listen to this interview in full below.