While rendering Pharrell William’s life story in Lego is already a remarkable feat of entertainment weirdness, the fact that he failed to tell his superstar co-stars that they would be made real via the famous Danish bricks pushes the project’s wacky factor even further off the scale.
Yes, while plotting the movie and recruiting its considerable raft of stars to help deliver his rags to riches rise to fame, Williams entirely failed to mention the ‘L’ word…
Piece by Piece has won plaudits for both its storytelling and animation, the key component of which being the accurate recreation of its stars and their surroundings in the (admittedly CG-created) medium of Lego. (Note to US readers: They're ‘Lego’. Not ‘Legos’. Ok?)
The movie features Williams appearing alongside such notables as Daft Punk, Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Kendrick Lamar, Busta Rhymes, Snoop Dogg, Pusha-T and Timbaland, all of who appear as Lego ‘minifigs’, expertly made to look like the their real-life counterparts while being expertly voiced by the stars themselves.
But while the words of each cast member were recorded for the documentary – spelling out the events of the movie and their part in William’s rise to the top in frank and honest enough terms to give the movie a PG rating – at no point were they told that their voice would be placed in the mouths of animated Lego likenesses.
“I was given Lego sets as a child, and that was a really amazing platform for me to allow my imagination to flourish and to learn things about myself, as it has for most kids and a lot of people - millions and millions of people on this planet,” explained Williams to Variety at the Toronto Film Festival at the Piece by Piece premiere.
“We purposely did not tell anyone that that would be the finished product. We wanted people to just answer the questions and really give their full, unedited reactions to the opportunity to do the interviews,” Williams continues.
“If we would’ve said, ‘OK, this is going to be in Lego,’ then people would have sort of curved what they were saying. We didn’t want them to be influenced by what we wanted. We wanted the purest part. And I feel like part of the magic of what makes this film pop the way it does is because it’s so vivid and it’s not scripted.
“It would’ve started to have felt like, ‘Oh, we’re making this for kids.’ And it’s like, ‘No, we’re not. We’re making this for human beings. And while I am a Black man that comes from a marginalised community, we wanted this story to feel universal, and that was the reason why we told it through the guise of Lego.”
So how did the big reveal go down. Were there any big egos not happy with being miniaturised? Williams says not. “Everybody was pleasantly surprised and incredibly supportive,” he gushed.
Notably, even Neptunes production partner Chad Hugo is enthusiastically on board, appearing in the movie’s early scenes despite Williams recently admitting that the pair are “no longer on speaking terms.”
“This film, it’s a project that’s just been the sum of a lot of yeses. When you come from where I come from and you look like me, you hear a lot of noes,” Williams added.
“But [writer, director] Morgan Neville said yes. Lego said yes. Focus said yes. Universal said yes. And the universe itself said yes. When people ask me about this project, I tell them, ‘Man, we’re working on the impossible.’ This is nearly impossible.”
