Piece by Piece (2024 film)

Piece by Piece
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Morgan Neville
Produced by	Pharrell Williams Mimi Valdés Caitrin Rogers Morgan Neville Shani Saxon
Starring	Pharrell Williams Morgan Neville Gwen Stefani Kendrick Lamar Timbaland Justin Timberlake Busta Rhymes Jay-Z Snoop Dogg Pusha T
Music by	Pharrell Williams (songs and themes) Michael Andrews (score)
Production companies	The Lego Group Tremolo Productions I Am Other Pure Imagination Studios Tongal
Distributed by	Focus Features (United States) Universal Pictures (International)
Release dates	August 30, 2024 (2024-08-30) (Telluride Film Festival) October 11, 2024 (2024-10-11) (United States)
Country	United States
Language	English

Piece by Piece is a 2024 American animated documentary film co-produced and directed by Morgan Neville. It follows the life and career of American musician Pharrell Williams, who stars in the film, through the lens of Lego animation. Produced by The Lego Group, Tremolo Productions, Williams' I Am Other, Pure Imagination Studios and Tongal. Piece by Piece will mark the fifth theatrical Lego-based film and it will be the first LEGO film distributed by Focus Features in North America and Universal Studios internationally. It is not a film that is considered part of Universal Pictures's run of their film rights. Alongside Williams and Neville, the film stars the voices of Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, and Pusha T.

Williams had considered creating a film about his life since 2013, though serious plans for a documentary in animated musical form started in 2019 following a discussion between the musician and Neville. Neville interviewed with Williams' associates remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, and later shot certain live-action scenes with him. The Lego Group created minifigure pieces that better represent the styles of African-American culture, as well as Williams's frequent collaborators, and designed new pieces for music equipment. Williams, who also produces, wrote five original songs for the film.

Piece by Piece premiered at the 51st Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2024, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2024, and will close the 68th BFI London Film Festival on October 20, 2024., and is scheduled to be released theatrically in the United States on October 11 through Focus Features, with Universal handling international distribution.

Premise

The film documents Pharrell Williams's life and musical career, incorporating Williams's faith and expressing his artistry by means of Lego.

Voice cast

• Pharrell Williams as himself
• Morgan Neville as himself
• Gwen Stefani as herself
• Kendrick Lamar as himself
• Timbaland as himself
• Justin Timberlake as himself
• Busta Rhymes as himself
• Jay-Z as himself
• Snoop Dogg as himself
• Pusha T as himself

N.O.R.E. and Daft Punk also make appearances as themselves.

Production

Development

The film's production spanned around five years. Following the success of the songs "Happy" and "Get Lucky" in 2013, Williams's agent would encourage him to pursue creating a biography, encouraging him to "do it [his] own way". Williams was not interested in making a "traditional" biopic, but rather wanted to convey the story in a more imaginative and "genre-defying" way, where audiences would "immerse in a world where the possibilities are endless". Williams would recall, "Everyone was doing them at the time, and I was like, 'Hell no.' I never want to do what everybody else is doing". Williams approached Neville's agent with the idea for the film in early 2019, and after Neville had heard Williams's pitch, he agreed to help develop the project. Williams would reiterate on his sentiment, stating "I never really wanted to do it, but when I was given the opportunity to do a documentary any way I wanted, and Morgan raised his hand, it was like, "OK, this could be interesting"." Williams's producing partner Mimi Valdés helped him decide which parts of his life and career he wanted to document.

Neville initially began having conversations with Williams in person in early 2020. After the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Neville recruited Williams's friends and collaborators to appear in the movie quickly, recounting that "There was not a single person who, when we asked them to participate, even hesitated". The vast majority of his work with them transitioned into talking on his phone in his living room with people remotely, sending them audio personnel if they could not access a studio. Some live-action scenes were shot, including one with Williams at Virginia Beach. Being his animated film debut, Neville felt it was "incredibly exciting" to be able to control every visual aspect of the film, as opposed to the live-action films he had directed in the past. He explained the animated medium helped to better "channel" Williams into the story. After previous license holder Warner Bros. Pictures, which produced The Lego Movie franchise, let their rights to create Lego films lapse, Universal Pictures bought them in April 2020, to last through 2025.

Neville and Williams had a "number of conversations" with The Lego Group about creating hairpieces and skin tones that were more inclusive to African-Americans, pushing them to forensically examine different hairstyles and facial features. For the film, Lego created new pieces for boom boxes and turntables, and recreated recording studios for the first time. They would also design minifigures for Williams's collaborators.

On June 6, 2024, Williams, Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, and Busta Rhymes were revealed to be cast in the film. In an interview published that day with Variety, Neville revealed that Daft Punk also appear in the film.

Music

Williams wrote five original songs for the project, describing two specifically. He described the first as "made for a specific scene", and the second, also made for a specific scene, as "like my thesis — [which is] that God is the greatest". Music that he composed with longtime creative partner Chad Hugo, as well as Williams's collaborations with other artists will feature in the film, such as Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" and Wreckx-n-Effect's "Rump Shaker". Neville noted that Williams had also created early tracks and "other bits of score" during production. The film score was composed by Michael Andrews.

Williams released the first single for the soundtrack, "Piece by Piece", on September 6, 2024. It features the Princess Anne High School's marching band, the Fabulous Marching Cavaliers.

Marketing

The project was officially announced on January 26, 2024. On June 6, 2024, Focus Features and Williams revealed the first trailer for the film. It features Lego Williams and director Neville in a sit-down interview, which then transitions to Williams narrating his career highlights. Writing for USA Today, Brendan Morrow observed that "the project look(s) like a unique mix of an animated film and a documentary". Dexerto observed that the appearance of Kendrick Lamar in the film, who had recently seen increased media coverage due to his feud with Canadian rapper Drake, was a subject of attention, with many commentators dubbing him "KenBRICK Lamar". The film's poster was revealed on August 29, which was noted for featuring Daft Punk. At TIFF, one of the venues where the film premiered, a Lego figure of Williams was placed in David Pecaut Square to promote its release.

Williams has stated that Lego will release sets to tie in with the film.

Release

Piece by Piece premiered at the 51st Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2024, screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2024. It will close the 68th BFI London Film Festival on October 20, 2024. It is scheduled to be released theatrically in the United States by Focus Features, with Universal Pictures handling international distribution, on October 11, 2024, and in the United Kingdom on November 8.

The TIFF premiere was noted for having been interrupted by a PETA protestor targeting Williams's Louis Vuitton men's fashion collection, who held a sign reading "Pharrell: Stop Supporting Killing Animals for Fashion", and ran around disruptively, shouting at Williams and climbing the stage. Williams agreed and praised the act, saying "God bless you" repeatedly to the protestor, and encouraged the audience to applaud and say the same, before she was kicked out. He then addressed the disruption, saying "Rome wasn't made in a day. And sometimes, when you have plans to change things and situations, you have to get in a situation of power and of influence where you can change people’s minds and help progression". He also said "That is not necessarily the way to do it, and sitting in my position, when I have conversations on behalf of organizations like that unbeknownst to them, they come out here and do themselves a disservice. But that's OK, when that change comes, everybody in this room will remember that I told you, we are actually working on that. And if she would've just asked me, I would've told her. But instead, she wanted to repeat herself."

Reception

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of 12 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.3/10.. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 59 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.

Deadline Hollywood's Pete Hammond wrote that the film "brings a freshness and originality to a docu format that makes it feel all new again." He appreciated Neville and Williams's use of the latter's synethesia to express the musician's songs in a way that makes it "a gorgeous musical fantasia". Hammond singled out the importance of the story beats, and named a sequence when "the ultra confident never-say-no side of the budding artist shows him going overboard in meetings with record label executives" one of his favorite parts of the film. Hammond concluded that "Williams and Neville have taken it apart and put it all back together to perfection." In a B- review, Entertainment Weekly's Maureen Lee Lenker called it "a fresh take on a talking heads documentary, recreating moments of Williams' past with Lego reenactments and visualizing Williams' relationship with music through colorful, glowing bricks." She hailed the Lego figures of Williams and his collaborators for giving the film a "playful, vibrant lens" at first, yet admitted that some sequences would have been better expressed by live action. Though she bemoaned the lacking of much insight into Williams's creative processes, she appreciated "the sweet story of how Pharrell devised his massive hit, "Happy," and the emotional response triggered by its success", among the brighter moments in the film. Of its informative value, she concluded it was disappointing, yet she said audiences would be happy to watch "beloved childhood days be implemented in narrative nonfiction storytelling", finding that aspect charming.

Reviewing for IndieWire, Caleb Hammond found the best moments of the film in the opening, lauding the "well-executed gags and fantastical visual flourishes make creative use of the Lego framing", which he said proved it "much more than an empty stunt." Hammond cited a moment in which Williams and his producing partner Chad Hugo got stoned in a studio with Snoop Dogg and a retinue of Crips before coming up with the beat to "Drop It Like It's Hot" as a highlight. However, he was disappointed in Hugo's relegation to being a comedic background character, the film's lack of detail to Williams's creative moments, and the "glossing over" of revealing moments such as the reason why the Neptunes disbanded. He welcomed Williams's open admission of arrogance during a "dry spell" at a lower point in his career, though he felt it was "perfunctory" to move this along to the "more joyous" closing act. Assessing the film as visually inventive and affirmatively positive, he assigned it a B-. For Lovia Gyarkye of The Hollywood Reporter, Williams's characteristic irreverence meant that the film's concept of being built in LEGO was not "a completely strange and off-kilter idea". She felt its representation of Williams's story was "sweet and inspiring", though she felt that the film being a celebrity biography "expectedly marked [it with] typical hagiographic evasiveness." She said that while Neville helped the film speak to self-acceptance, the true persuasion came with Williams's story moments. She opined that one of the film's strengths was the way the LEGO animation "enhances our understanding of Williams' process", and found that the musician's five original songs compliment the film. She felt that while vague, it was ultimately inspiring.

External links

• Piece by Piece at IMDb