How They Made Him Into LEGO Form

EXCLUSIVE: The single-most ambitious documentary of the year may be the Oscar-contending Piece by Piece, Morgan Neville’s film about music producer, singer, performer, and fashion designer Pharrell Williams. The Oscar-winning filmmaker shot a full-on nonfiction feature about Pharrell – going into the field with him and interviewing close friends and associates like Missy Elliot, Snoop Dogg, Pusha T, and Gwen Stefani. But then he went a step further – way further – transforming Williams, his environment, and people close to him into LEGOs.

It was Pharrell’s idea. “I was pretty sure he was serious,” Neville recalls about first hearing Pharrell’s concept. “And I instantly loved the idea even though I didn’t know what that would mean because there was no map to make a film like this. And, so, I was both excited and nervous, maybe. We had to figure out how exactly you make a film like this.”

To get an idea of how the director put the LEGO pieces together, we asked him and the film’s animation director, Howard E. Baker, to break down a scene for us, which you can watch above. It’s a side-by-side sequence showing real Pharrell returning to the Atlantis Apartments in Virginia Beach, VA where he grew up, juxtaposed with how the scene appears in LEGO form.

MORGAN NEVILLE: There’s a gear of the film that is very much almost one-to-one translation of real-world-to-animation, which is unusual. And then we had all the other gears that animation gave us — fantasy parts and movie parts. But I think the idea of taking something so literal and so real and trying to put it in something as unreal, surreal as LEGO was part of the fun challenge.”

HOWARD E. BAKER: We started this very much like we would with any LEGO project, which was the design process.

We have to build everything. And so we’re very careful about making sure that we’re building things that work within our scope. And in this case, we kept getting thrown huge wrenches in that, “Oh yeah, you’ve got to design and build this thing that we’re only going to see once or that we’re only going to use once.” Things like Pharrell’s costuming. In this film he has 80 different outfits. And that’s unheard of in an animation. I think Snow White goes throughout [her] film wearing two outfits, and that’s the same with many, many animated cartoon characters. They just don’t change their clothes.

The LEGO movies, I think, they’re very self-conscious about being a toy world, even though they don’t talk about being necessarily a LEGO world, but they are very much this little place. We wanted [Piece by Piece] to feel much more like a really big place like our world. And when I worked with the designers, I told them, “Guys, don’t build this to look like a LEGO world, build it to look like our world made of LEGO.”

DEADLINE: There are moments one doesn’t normally witness in documentary, like the ghost of Pharrell’s grandmother in the scene above.

MN: No, it’s not normal to be able to see ghosts on camera, but in animation, sure, why not? That’s the animation part is that you get to be subjective in a way that you can’t in documentary — you can see things through your character ‘s eyes. You can control the world in that way.

As you see, there were so many things that were really rooted in exactly what happened [when we shot in the field]… that you would never normally put into an animated film or even a scripted film like the crow interrupting Pharrell while we’re talking, or the Blue Angels flying overhead. That just happened. So, I wouldn’t have thought to do that, but when it happens, you’re like, well, you have to honor that… People shouting at Pharrell when we walked into [the Atlantis Apartments], lots of things like that.

HEB: In the animation process, we became much more inspired by randomness, and we probably didn’t super, super finesse even the layout and the camera sometimes, letting it be a lot looser than we might have in animation, to sort of match a handheld capture-something-in-the-moment kind of camera work.

MN: In that scene [above] you even see a LEGO boom operator because the boom operator did get into the shot there and that happens.

Another thing that Pharrell had mentioned is that when people typically come to a place like Atlantis, the housing project, they see it as the ‘hood,’ as he would say… It looks like this is government housing and it’s maybe sad and gray. Maybe a little overgrown. The thing Pharrell was clear about is that he always saw Alantis as a magical place. And it’s interesting going back and looking at the side by side because we’re very much living more in Pharrell’s view of that world than how the camera captures it — that you’re able to kind of see it subjectively. And that was something that I know Pharrell really loved because he just didn’t want people to feel sorry for him for having grown up there because he thought it was actually a magical place to have grown up.

DEADLINE: How did you get permission from the good people of LEGO to do the documentary?

MN: I went and met with Jill Wilfert, who runs LEGO Film and has been there for decades maybe… She instantly kind of got it and loved this project. And I think they knew this was maybe uncomfortable for them, but uncomfortable in a good way, like it was pushing them in a way that made them think about race and character and form and think about different types of storytelling too, and different audiences. I will say, Jill said to me, “I’m glad you came to me,” because maybe if I’d knocked on the door next to hers, I would’ve gotten a “no.” The fact that I knocked on her door — she became our champion within LEGO and made it happen.

DEADLINE: In the scene above, we see Pharrell’s pensiveness and sadness as he remembers his grandmother. How were you about to make sure emotion come through in LEGO animation?

HEB: Even though [human] faces are complex, we’ve been able to animate very simple characters throughout history and get pathos and emotion out of those characters. And, so, I think we’ve all learned how to simplify emotions and break them down. LEGO characters, they’re actually not three-dimensional, the faces. The faces are actually 2D animation that’s been mapped onto these three-dimensional [forms]. And, so, we create a huge library of emotional states that the animators have to pull from.

DEADLINE: You’ve got so many Pharrell friends and collaborators in the film – Boots Riley, Missy Elliott, Snoop Dogg. How did you get their permission to LEGO-fy them?

MN: We just said we were making an animated movie, an animated documentary, and a lot of people said, “Okay, fine.”

I think there was also a lot of trust for Pharrell. There were, I don’t know, six or eight different big stars that said, “Whatever you’re going to do with my character, I just want to see it before it’s done.” And so we sent out a 3D character render of each of the characters to those people, and that was the first thing they saw. They didn’t see it in scenes. All they saw was what the character looked like from all the angles. And half of them said, “I love it. That’s great.” And half of them said — I think Snoop wanted different clothes. A few people had some thoughts about, “Well, what would I be wearing?” Or, “My hair really is like this now.” But it wasn’t contentious. I think actually one of the more complicated ones was Missy Elliott.

HEB: It wasn’t contentious, it’s just that she kind of really kept finessing it and then making small changes. And then of course, every small change equals a large change when it comes to process. But in the end, I really love the Missy Elliott design because of her contribution to it and that she wanted to love it so much and that it became this very lovable design. So, she probably came back with about eight iterations of her design… Before we even got to Missy, we had versions of Missy, and then Pharrell had thoughts on what Missy should look like. There was just a lot of people thinking what Missy should look like. And then when it came down to it, it was what Missy thought Missy should look like.

Missy has actual three-dimensional earrings, and that’s never been done on a LEGO mini fig. [figure] before and that had to get approved by LEGO. But because those hoop earrings are such a big part of her look and iconic, we thought they were really important to put on earrings for her in all three of her character designs — her as an adult, her as a teenager, and her as a junior high school-aged kid. And all of them have some sort of 3D earrings on them.

DEADLINE: How would you describe the reception for the film?

MN: People [who haven’t seen the film] are a little confused as to what it is… The thing I will say is once people see the film, they completely get it. It makes complete sense once you see the film. It’s just a hard thing to describe going in.