‘Piece by Piece’ Director Morgan Neville Will Never Use AI Again

Morgan Neville knows not everything we talk about will make it into this story. After making dozens of documentaries, he understands that in order to be told properly, the best stories have to leave some parts out.

That’s definitely true of Piece by Piece, his new “creative nonfiction” documentary about Pharrell Williams. Built using audio interviews with collaborators like Kendrick Lamar and Missy Elliott—many of which Neville conducted remotely during Covid-19 lockdowns—it’s a biopic of Williams’ life animated entirely with Lego. Because Williams’ career as a hitmaker spans 30-plus years, and given the fact that animation is expensive, Neville knew he had to leave some stuff out.

“People say, ‘Oh, the interviews are so great.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I used the good ones,’” he says, sitting in a restaurant off of Central Park, a few days before Piece by Piece’s New York premiere. “They don’t know all the interviews that I didn’t use or parts of interviews. So there’s that part of it too.”

So what pieces are missing? A story Williams told about getting a call from Michael Jackson, what happened when Justin Timberlake visited the Neptunes’ studio in Virginia Beach. It actually ends right as Williams is starting to get deep. But that’s the thing with movies: They can only tell you so much.

Same is true of this interview. Still, when WIRED sat down with Neville, we covered a lot, from his next movie about Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles era to why his experience using artificial intelligence on his Anthony Bourdain documentary made him swear off the tech for good.

Angela Watercutter: So, why Pharrell Williams? You’ve done a lot of music docs, but why did you pick him over any other subject?

Morgan Neville: He approached me.

Oh, well, that helps.

I wouldn’t have thought of doing a Pharrell documentary out of the blue, and honestly, I was kind of burnt out on doing music documentaries. It just felt like I’d kind of been there, done that.

Was there something about Pharrell that made you want to give a music doc another shot?

I’m actually way more interested in producers than I am artists, because artists tend to have a very similar story and they’re in their own little bubble. But producers have to navigate different worlds. I keep gravitating towards producers. On top of that, in our first meeting he said, “I want you to try and do a documentary about me, and when you’re done, I want you to do it again in Lego.”

So the Lego idea was his pitch.

Honestly at that moment, that’s what hooked me.

How hard was it to get Lego onboard? Do you have to get on a plane to Denmark?

No. Well, Lego, their film office is in LA. And Jill Wilfert has run it for a decade. I pitched her and within five minutes she was like, “I kind of love this idea.” Thank God, because the film would’ve died then [if she hadn’t]. There was no other version of it that made sense.

Speaking of Lego as a medium, watching the movie I was struck by how that sort of fed into Pharrell’s synesthesia. Like, he wants to tell the story of his music, but he sees it in colors and shapes.

I mean, he never said it quite like that, but I am sure it’s connected to how he thinks.

For each beat and each song, I’d say, what color is this song? Even in the Kendrick song, “Alright,” I said, “What color is that song?” And he said, “It’s like this cascading blue and gray.” And we ended up animating that whole kind of rainbow that Kendrick kind of comes out on in the film. But that’s because he has all that stuff in his head.

Is it right that you didn’t tell any of the interview subjects they were going to be turned into Lego minifigs, essentially?

We didn’t tell anybody.

Did you get any feedback after they found out? Does Jay-Z call you and say, “I didn’t expect that.”

We started doing interviews almost five years ago. We also didn’t want people to know, we didn’t want it to be public that we were doing this Lego movie. I didn’t want people thinking about the fact that they were going to be in Lego. I just wanted them to talk to me. I told them we were going to animate it.

So, not quite a lie …

Certain people, a handful of big artists, said before they would sign off, “I just want to be able to see what my character looks like.” So we sent Jay or Snoop a little 3D render of their character, and everybody was thrilled.

Did they ask for minifigs of themselves?

I think everybody wants a minifig of themselves and other people.

I mean, Daft Punk is another one where they’re very particular about how they’re represented. So they saw a draft of the characters and they just wanted to make sure the angles, the helmets were right.

Funny, from a duo that already has helmets that look like Lego helmets.

Their creative director came over to our office. I showed him that. I showed him the scene, and then he said, “Whatever you want, we’ll do it.” He was so happy. So yeah, I mean, who doesn’t want to be in Lego in that way?

In the movie, the interviews are presented as though you went to people’s homes, but you did a bunch over Zoom during the pandemic, right?

Yeah, I did most of them on my couch at home. I did ’em on a Zoom or phone. It actually was kind of a perfect pandemic project.

Were there any technical glitches?

I always made sure we’re getting good audio. I’d send a sound person to them or they had a home studio or whatever. Missy Elliott, I remember she was one of the first interviews, and it was early in the pandemic to the point where I couldn’t send a sound person to her house. So I mailed her a little digital recorder, and then I had to talk her through setting it up.

For artists like her or Jay-Z or Snoop, are they maybe more open because they’re not talking about themselves, which maybe they’re less likely to want to do at this point?

I don’t want to go too deep on it, but I also feel like there’s the kind of fluff version of interviews that people are used to giving. Like, oh, “Pharrell’s a wonderful artist, and blah, blah, blah.” And I remember doing an interview with Jon Platt, who’s in the film, who’s the CEO of Sony Publishing and mentor to Pharrell. Early on in the interview, I started pushing him on some of the misses that Pharrell had had, and he said, “Oh, you want to go there?”

I was like, “Yeah, I really want to go there.”

And I think a lot of people, they’re protective of Pharrell, and I think Pharrell’s always been kind of a private person. I was interviewing his wife and his parents and everybody for the first time.

I think people just don’t want to embarrass somebody that they care about. But what I have realized in the years of doing this and working with high-profile people is that the embarrassing thing is to not go there. The embarrassing thing is to do the fluff surface piece.

Are there any nuggets that didn’t make it, that if you had a three-hour film you would have put in?

I mean, not really. It’s funny that a lot of people talk about director’s cuts of the film. I’m one of those people where my director’s cuts would be shorter.

I mean, there are other stories. Like, Gwen [Stefani]’s story and Justin [Timberlake]’s story. We had a big Justin scene, but they were kind of the same story, about [Williams] starting to work with pop artists around 2002. And I have to trim out something.

I feel like there’s a little more Gwen in the movie than Justin.

There was a whole great story about Justin going down to Virginia Beach and working with [the Neptunes] and how crappy their studio was. But part of it was Gwen brought this female energy to the film.

There are a lot of dudes.

So I think part of it is we just needed a different energy.

There were a couple times during the movie where I kind of knew the story, or found out I didn’t know the story as well as I thought I did. One was what role Pharrell played in working on Wreckx-n-Effect’s “Rump Shaker” and the other was about Justified, which—according to urban legend—was full of beats the Neptunes had originally made for Michael Jackson.

I mean, most of Pharrell’s songs were written for other people. I mean, “Frontin’,” his own song, he wrote for Prince, which we say in the film; “Happy” he wrote for CeeLo Green. Most of what he had written for Justified, he had written for Michael, and Michael didn’t bite.

I had this other story that we had in the film at some point where Michael called Pharrell, and Pharrell was like “You’re full of it, there’s no way this is Michael Jackson.” Then Michael started singing, and he was singing songs from Justified. So Michael later acknowledged that those were great songs.

Would adding that bit have opened up a can of worms? You kind of can’t just glance over Michael Jackson.

I mean everybody from Beyoncé to Kanye [West], even though he’s worked with all these people, and it’s like you can’t just, if you dip your toe into them, then it’s both unsatisfying and kind of brings up more like, “Well, what about that? Let’s get deeper into that story.” And I always look at those things as narrative quicksand.

Is that something you just had to make a call about?

It wasn’t like I was ever going to interview Kanye.

It wasn’t like Kanye had any—or Puff, another controversial person—Pharrell never had a deep relationship with any of them.

It’s wild that this movie is coming out at a time when a lot of the people involved are part of an industry that’s going through some turmoil right now.

The kind of reckoning that’s happening in the hip-hop world is long overdue.

Pharrell’s almost the opposite. He’s been married to the same woman for, been with her for 20 years. He’s never done drugs. He doesn’t drink. He is like a health nut.

Not the stuff that normally gets into music docs.

It’s more like, where’s the friction in his life?

So in that way, from the kind of traditional rock-and-roll type of story, it’s not that kind of story. He doesn’t have that kind of story.

How do you work around that? Stories need tension, something to overcome, some deep, dark truth.

You need tension, but to me, there was all this dramatic tension around creativity, which I think is real.

My mentor, Peter Guralnick, a fantastic writer, told me early on that the least interesting things in stories about musicians are sex, drugs, and getting ripped off by your record label, because everybody has the exact same story. So, what’s interesting after those things?

If you look at every film I’ve done, it’s always been the things beyond those things … My Steve Martin documentary, the last one I did, is very similar. It’s not about fame or drugs or anything. Steve is squeaky clean. But it’s about how do you wrestle with your voice, how do you stay inspired?

Well, you mentioned a second ago that you felt like you might be done with music documentaries, but your next one is about Paul McCartney. How did you put yourself on that path?

I couldn’t say no. I’ve been a Beatles fanatic my whole life.

But this is a movie about the period after they broke up, right?

It’s this specific story that is actually to me, kind of the undertold story, which is everybody knows the Beatles story and after Get Back.

Yeah, you’re picking up where Peter Jackson left off, almost.

But this film is like, “Oh, what happens the next day? What happens the day you wake up and you’ve been a Beatle since you were 17, and now you have to figure out who you are?” It’s about the founding of Wings, really from the day the Beatles break up until the day John Lennon dies.

That’s still quite a swath of time.

People also don’t remember that Wings was one of the two or three biggest bands of the ’70s. Nobody ever mentions them when they talk about bands of the ’70s, because of the shadow of the Beatles. But you’re like, “Oh, there’s Elton John, Eagles, Wings. Maybe Led Zeppelin. Anyway, it’s just a different angle onto that story.

This is a bit off-topic, but I was just thinking about McCartney using AI to save that old Beatles song and thinking about when you used AI for Anthony Bourdain’s voice in Roadrunner. Were you surprised by the reaction it got?

I was surprised. To me it was more of an Easter egg. It became a landmine. I feel like I always channel my subjects. I’m kind of a method director, like the Mr. Rogers film, everything about the DNA of that is kind of reflecting Fred Rogers, and the DNA of Piece by Piece is reflecting Pharrell. Tony was like, Mr. Punk Rock—break every rule, fuck ’em all. I saw his notes on his edits on No Reservations and they were just “come on, break down the wall.” I wanted to keep his voice going in the film. I was like, “Oh, it’d be fun to use this, and it’d be a funny thing to talk about when we do.” I wasn’t hiding it.

Right. It’s a good anecdote for the press tour.

Then the shit hit the fan. Now where we’re at with AI, it feels quaint.

Do you feel like you were the canary in the coal mine?

Absolutely. Many people told me that there were other documentary projects that were doing the same thing, that all reacted; they either changed what they were doing or put giant disclaimers over everything. It had ramifications everywhere.

How do you see it now?

I mean, people Franken-bite things all the time. That’s what you call it to make people say things. I actually felt like we had more fidelity to what Tony was saying.

The thing that was unfortunate is the amount of work and love I put into that film. We all put in that film, and every word Tony ever said and wrote, we pored over. There was so much respect and concern for him. But then the way it plays out in the public is, “Oh, they just made shit up.” That’s not actually what we did. We actually were doing the opposite. But again, that’s how our social media works these days.

I was really kind of curious about that because I’m wondering what you think about it now. Now that there have been strikes over AI and it’s a big part of the conversation. In retrospect, what do you think about it as someone who got thrown into the middle.

I haven’t done any AI in anything I’ve done since.

I was going to ask that too.

Carl Sagan in [Piece by Piece] says, “Pharrell” and I was very clear to everybody that we were, with permission of his widow, going to make him say “Pharrell” without using AI. We actually experimented to construct the word from syllables [he actually said].

So I’ve assiduously avoided using it since, and I get all the fear.

Right.

Misinformation is something I care very deeply about.

We’re already seeing in this election, how these tools can be misused.

Absolutely.

The flip side of that is that there’s such a rule book of storytelling that at times feels limiting.

Filmmakers have always used whatever new tools there are to tell more interesting stories. I can’t say that there aren’t good things that can come out of generative AI or other things, other new technologies in terms of figuring out ways to tell stories.

Right.

The irony of it is like I’m a total Luddite. I’m not a techie person. I’m pretty old-school on most things.

I feel like people out there are coming around to this point of view.

It’s come so far in a way that makes it way scarier. So I get it. I’ll just say I’m not the flag bearer of pushing the envelope again and again in generative AI. The part I do think is a good thing is just figuring out new ways to tell stories.

Which is what you did with Piece by Piece.

Piece by Piece is controversial in its own way, and people are constantly wanting to label it or put it in a box.

Because of all the Lego?

It’s controversial because it’s like, is it a documentary? If it’s a documentary, there are rules. To me, I just say it’s creative nonfiction.

Well, and making it during Covid, you had fewer traditional options.

I’d forgotten about this until somebody just brought it up. We actually put a disclaimer at the end of the film, which somebody dug out and just printed, which is something, I’m paraphrasing, but [says] not everything in this film is 100 percent accurate. For instance, Pharrell never went to space.