But Pharrell’s connection with the LEGO brick goes beyond this set. He made headlines when, early in 2024, he announced that Piece by Piece, his upcoming animated biopic movie, would be shot in LEGO animation. Then the star-studded trailer dropped and broke the internet, and now the world is lining up to flock to the theaters after it hits the screens of the Telluride Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival.
We spoke to director Morgan Neville, the Academy Award winner and creative powerhouse behind some of the most innovative and moving documentaries of our time, about what it was like to be presented with that creative challenge:
“I’ve spent the past five years working on Piece by Piece, which was the most unlikely movie that I could have done, which is the thing that got me really excited about it. At the beginning, Pharrell’s agent called me and said, ‘Pharrell wants to talk to you about an idea, but I’m not allowed to tell you what it is.’ And so, I thought, ‘Hmm, interesting!’
Then, when we met, he told me that people had been interested in making documentaries about him for a long time, but he wasn’t very interested in making a traditional documentary, and he thought I could make a documentary about him and then remake it in LEGO animation. And that was the jumping-off point.”