Why music star Pharrell Williams chose to tell his life story with Lego

LOS ANGELES – Telling your life story on screen can become an exercise in ego. So to escape that trap, American musician and Grammy winner Pharrell Williams decided to turn a documentary about his career into an inspirational Lego-animated comedy.

Piece By Piece opens exclusively at The Projector in Singapore on Dec 12.

It recreates key moments in Williams’ journey to become a successful producer, rapper and singer-songwriter. The 51-year-old’s hits include Happy, his global chart-topping single.

The film also features the many American pop stars he has collaborated with, including Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, Snoop Dogg and Justin Timberlake, who all lend their voices to computer-animated Lego versions of themselves.

Speaking at a screening in Los Angeles earlier in 2024, Williams says he had resisted the idea of doing a film about his life.

“Because I pride myself on my curiosity. That’s what motivates me, and looking in the mirror, you kind of know everything about yourself and you’re not curious,” explains the star. He produced and wrote hit songs for artistes such as Nelly and Britney Spears before launching a solo performing career.

Like many people, he does not like hearing himself speak, either.

“Do you guys enjoy listening to yourself on voicemail? Imagine an hour of that,” he says. He was a vocalist on two of the biggest pop hits of 2013, Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, and has received 13 Grammy Awards, including multiple wins for Producer of the Year.

But people around him kept pushing the idea.

“When my very persistent agent continued to ask, I was, like, ‘There’s no chance, I’m not interested.’ Then he uttered the words, ‘You can do it whatever way you want.’

“And all of a sudden, it became a situation where it didn’t have to be a reflective process. This could be an exploration and an opportunity to be creative,” says Williams. He wrote five original songs for the film, which is also packed with snippets of older tracks he produced, wrote or performed.

He also wanted to work with American film-maker Morgan Neville. The director’s movie about back-up singers, 20 Feet From Stardom (2013), won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar and the Best Music Film Grammy.

“He’s a masterful storyteller,” says Pharrell. “This guy has the ability to allow the footage and the interviews to tell him what the film wants to be.

“This is somebody I could trust to give complete autonomy to, not only with my story but also my music – which was the biggest proof to myself of whether I could be humble enough to not get in the way and make this hubristic Frankenstein of a project, because that’s what it could have been very easily.”

Using Lego characters helped too.

“Deciding to tell it in Lego allowed it to have enough distance so that I could see myself objectively for once,” Williams says.

“And I have to say, when you become Lego-fied, it allows you to see beyond your flaws, your fears, your insecurities, your guilt and pressures, and you just get to see your soul’s purpose.”

The novelty of the approach also kept him motivated through the long production process, which began more than five years ago.

At the film’s premiere in New York earlier in 2024, Pharrell told Entertainment Tonight channel that he chose the format partly because of his children.

He and his wife Helen Lasichanh, a 44-year-old American fashion designer, have a 16-year-old son, Rocket, and seven-year-old triplets, whose names have not been publicly shared.

“We’ve always gotten them Lego sets since they were born. And when I was a kid, I loved Lego sets. That was my earliest childhood memory of having toys.”

And telling his life story using the colourful bricks was “because I wanted my children to be able to understand it as their dad would tell it in real time”, Williams says.

Piece By Piece opens exclusively at The Projector in Singapore on Dec 12.