Pharrell Williams has said that he didn’t warn Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg or the other famous faces in his new documentary that they were going to be transformed into LEGO figures.
The film, Piece By Piece, will be released on October 11. Early on in the film, Williams says that the best way he can express himself is through the medium of LEGO.
“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,” Williams told Variety at the Toronto Film Festival, where Piece by Piece was premiered.
It features talking head interviews and narrative sequences with many of Williams’ closest collaborators. Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Justin Timberlake, Pusha T and Timbaland also appear.
None of them were told that the film would be made with LEGO. “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 said.
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“Because if we would’ve said, ‘Okay, 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.”
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He continued: “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,’” Williams said. “And while I am a Black man that comes from a marginalized community, we wanted this story to feel universal, and that was the reason why we told it through the guise of Lego.”
Williams added that when the interviewees found out they would be appear in the film as Legos, “everybody was pleasantly surprised and incredibly supportive.”
“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,” he said. “But 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.”
Williams spoke to NME about the film back in June, revealing that he has “always been very self-conscious”.
“I thought that I was responsible for every song and record I sold [because] a lot of the songs were my ideas,” the ‘Happy’ singer said. “Chad and I working together: I would always beat my chest and say, ‘It was us. We’re the best.’ Then I turned 40 and I had a series of songs that I was asked to do but the idea of them was not mine.”