One of the most experimental hip-hop movies of all time is here.
October 11 sees the release of Piece By Piece, a documentary-biopic blend that tells the story of famed producer Pharrell Williams. His upbringing, the formation of the Neptunes, and a slew of famous music videos are brought to life on the big screen through glorious LEGO animation, adding a skew to this film unseen in musical cinema before.
Pharrell and the film’s director, Oscar-winning documentarian Morgan Neville, have been touring along the film festival circuit, a new experience the musician detailed in an interview with Complex.
“The jet lag is real,” he said. “I think what keeps me going is that I'm just running off of the adrenaline of gratitude, the idea that we're even here at this point, and that this is what we're doing. Even when you're jet lagged, you don't fall asleep when you’ve got that kind of energy going through your body.”
A good relationship between documentarian and subject requires a fascination with how the other moves through their chosen medium. For Neville, Pharrell’s way of thinking had him intrigued.
“Even though I made a lot of music projects, I'm really drawn to people who think like producers because they have a bigger vision of something than a vocalist would,” Neville explained. “They have to travel between different worlds, and I always loved seeing Pharrell popping up in these different worlds.”
Neville’s Oscar-winning 2013 film 20 Feet From Stardom, which looks into the lives of background singers, is what caught Pharrell’s attention. Whatever trepidation Pharrell might've had was washed away by Neville's hyper-focus on wallflowers, people in the distance who are equally as pivotal to an artist's success.
“The idea that someone would give platform to people who really don’t have voices and are the real reason why the lead singer can be who they are, seeing that angle putting a film around it was smart to me.”
Piece By Piece’s animated format is fully realized in the film, allowing the audience to experience Pharrell’s synesthesia, a condition that reroutes cognitive and/or sensory information through different bodily pathways. For Pharrell, he sees sounds as colors, something he explained in a December 2013 NPR interview. Depicting something only Pharrell could see and feel was a challenge he wanted to undertake.
“The synesthesia experience is unique to each person, so it was about just explaining my experience with [Neville], and not only what my mind's eye sees, but also how it makes me feel,” Pharrell said. “It helps me have a framework for what I'm perceiving, like a schematic. I think that helped him figure out how he was going to illustrate it. It was definitely a challenge, but I think we got there because it made sense to me.”
Neville added, “I have to give props to Michelle Gagné, who's a legendary animator we brought in just to work on synesthesia and to help us crack how to represent it. But the colors were something that Pharrell talked a lot about. I remember going through a lot of songs and asking Pharrell, ‘What are the colors you see for these songs or these beats?’ Going into the Kendrick scene for ‘Alright,’ I'm asking Pharrell what the colors were, and then we ended up building a whole rainbow of LEGO out of that color that he described.”
Very few people get the chance to see their life from a third-person perspective. Pharrell finds watching the film an affecting experience, one that took him by surprise. He explained that the whole process has been "surreal," especially considering his affinity for the plastic bricks which gave him a "different feeling" on himself and his life.
The synesthesia experience is unique to each person, so it was about just explaining my experience with [Neville], and not only what my mind's eye sees, but also how it makes me feel. - Pharrell Williams
Neville, meanwhile, described himself as someone fascinated by genius, exemplified by his repeated filmic examinations of musicians. Working with Pharrell has added another layer to his view on genius.
“It's about conviction,” Neville explained. “I think there are a lot of interesting ideas and a lot of talented people, but it's not just having the idea. It's the conviction of that idea. I think Pharrell has a kind of magical thinking, but magical thinking is not just seeing something differently or imagining two flavours that shouldn't go together, going together. It's actually willing those things to happen, making good on them. This film is an exact example of that.”
A significant part of the film deals with Pharrell’s downturn in popularity at the midpoint of this career. Depicted in the film are his struggles to establish his solo career after the success of "Frontin’" and the ways in which predatory forces in the music industry robbed him of his creative edge. We’re shown suit-bearing vampiric LEGO figures who lurk in the corners of the studio with Pharrell, pushing him away from artistic freedom and towards commercial sounds. Pharrell still believes that the music industry is skewed away from benefitting artists.
“I think that the music industry’s monetization model is all the way off," he said. "0.003% of a cent per stream is just insane, but I don't think that it's going to stay that way for long. Change is coming. In fact, it's being engineered as we speak. The value has to be on the IP, not on the ancillary things. Right now, an artist is focused on what they're going to make on tour, the merch, and all these other things, but the value has to be back into the intellectual property, the song itself, the composition, the album, the bodies of work. The change is going to start with the artists, but the system is going to have to acclimate or else get left behind.”
Piece By Piece sings when expressing its love for the era of hip-hop Pharrell came up in and helped engineer. This presents itself in the form of a barrage of iconic music videos and moments recreated in LEGO animation. Neville is particularly fond of a video that helped launch Pharrell’s career.
“Doing the ‘Rump Shaker’ video in LEGO was so much fun,” he said. “I couldn’t believe we were getting away with doing that. We had the old MTV logo at the start to announce it and then we literally ended up debating with the Motion Picture Association of America how wide the bikini backs would be on the girls in the ‘Rump Shaker' video, even though LEGOs don't really have rear ends. So ‘Rump Shaker’ led to a whole lot of really interesting conversations.”
Pharrell has his eye on the past and the future at once, expressing his love for a recreation of the ‘Grindin’’ video, but also for the film’s title track, a song set to images of Pharrell bringing light to the world after a philosophical conversation with a cosmic entity taking the form of Carl Sagan, “That was a lot of fun, even though that hasn't happened.”
There’s still time, Pharrell.
