In Lego, anything is possible — within limits. Just ask the documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville.
Mr. Neville, an Oscar winner, spent the past five years turning the life story of Pharrell Williams into an animated documentary created entirely from Legos. And those Danish-designed building blocks allowed him to create things that would typically fall outside the genre’s constraints.
He illustrated Mr. Williams’s experience of synesthesia, which allows him to see color when he hears sounds, through translucent Lego pieces. They gave Mr. Neville the tools to turn the signature beats of the multi-hyphenate — rapper, producer and fashion designer are among Mr. Williams’s titles — into colorful bricks that he could take out of storage and transform into a hit song. And it ushered in some fantastical scenes that show Mr. Williams lost in outer space or trapped inside a whirlpool.
“One thing I realized right away was that it wasn’t just about translating a documentary into animation,” said Mr. Neville, who on Friday will debut “Piece by Piece,” a $16 million musical documentary via Focus Features. “It was about using what animation could do that documentary couldn’t do, which is take you into the fantasy world. I found it so liberating, all the things you can communicate visually that you don’t have to say.”
The film is also a stretch for Lego, which defied odds back in 2014 when it released “The Lego Movie” to both commercial and critical acclaim. (That movie grossed $471 million worldwide, and its signature song, “Everything Is Awesome,” landed an Oscar nomination.) The toy company made three more films in partnership with Warner Bros. before moving to Universal Pictures in 2020. That arrangement, while four years old, has yet to produce a movie. “Piece by Piece” is not part of that deal, though it was made by a subsidiary of Universal.
“We really always want to be doing something that is inspiring people, that’s fitting with the brand and what we stand for, but that is also unexpected,” Jill Wilfert, a senior vice president of global entertainment at the Lego Group, said in an interview. “We were looking to come back onto the big screen, and this felt like a nice way to do something that was definitely going to defy people’s expectations.”
Still, adjustments had to be made.
The filmmakers received a 130-page manual that detailed the dos and don’ts of the Lego brand. The primary message: A majority of the movie should be created with existing Lego parts. If a part didn’t exist, it would have to be created, but always with the Lego quality in mind.
So when Lego pieces of the rapper Pusha T’s braids were originally designed, the company requested that they be made thicker. (In the pieces’ original form, closer to the rapper’s own hair, Lego deemed that should a braid break off, it would be a choking hazard.)
Other times, the animators refashioned an existing part for a new purpose. The scientist Carl Sagan’s turtleneck (yes, Mr. Sagan appears in the documentary) didn’t exist as a Lego, but one was created by using a pastor’s clerical collar and turning it around.
Another complication: tweaking the film to get a PG rating instead of PG-13, to make it more palatable for the traditional Lego audience.
Marijuana smoke wafting through the studio where Snoop Dogg’s song “Drop It Like It’s Hot” was being recorded? Too racy. (It was replaced with a mini-figure spraying smoke out of a canister labeled “PG Spray.”) And the thong bikinis featured on a group of backup dancers during the group Wreckx-N-Effect’s “Rump Shaker” music video? They had to be widened to full coverage bathing suit bottoms in order to comply with the PG standards. That change was a tough one to swallow, Mr. Neville said, considering “there are no butts on a mini-figure.”
He recalled one particular internal meeting, titled “Thongs and Pimps,” in which he and his producers went through a scene to remove as many pieces of underwear and nefarious characters as needed to comply with the coveted PG rating. (One pimp remains. Look closely.)
“I feel like Lego’s constraints were pretty much the rated R constraints, which I had kind of bought into in the beginning,” Mr. Neville said. “So I knew that I couldn’t have a Lego joint in the film. Things like that I just knew I couldn’t ever do.”
He said those guardrails had led to more creativity. The PG Spray is one of his favorite jokes. A few poop emojis replace some strong language. And the pieces designed as hair for characters like Pusha-T and Jay-Z had never appeared in a Lego movie before.
Mr. Williams, who also served as an executive producer on the film, wrote five new songs and spent time ensuring that the characters in the movie — his friends, family and collaborators — were depicted as accurately as a block-bodied Lego mini-figure allows. He pointed to the hairstyles of Pusha T, Kendrick Lamar and Snoop Dogg as elements that he had been most concerned with.
“We spent time,” Mr. Williams said, adding that his close-cropped haircut also took a lot of effort to get right. “In my culture, we call that a Caesar cut, and the line is so important, and that didn’t exist in Lego before,” he said. “But then we got them to do that on my figure. I’m very proud of that.”
Mr. Williams, who currently serves as the men’s creative director for Louis Vuitton, said he had additional plans to collaborate with Lego. And the toy company, which is staying mum on projects in development with Universal Pictures, said it viewed “Piece by Piece” as a jumping-off point for other kinds of personal stories.
Celebrities as varied as musicians and athletes are reaching out, looking for a Lego adaptation, Ms. Wilfert said.
“Everybody wants to have their story told in Lego bricks now,” she said.
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