🎧 Morgan Neville on Pharrell, Legos and a 'Magical Thinker'
The Oscar-winning documentarian reveals what went into 'Piece by Piece' and why he took the project on
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
Morgan Neville knows there are supposed to be rules about documentaries and what you can and can’t do with them. But after 30 years as a documentarian, winning an Oscar in 2014 for 20 Feet From Stardom and having made acclaimed projects about everyone from Orson Welles to Mister Rogers, Neville found himself ready to break away from the rulebook — particularly when a subject who is a “magical thinker” came calling.
It was Pharrell Williams’ idea to ask Neville to make a documentary about his life, and also his idea to capture it in Legos, a “liberating” format as Neville describes it. “I felt like it gave me access to get inside his head in a way that I couldn’t if I was shooting him with the camera,” Neville says of the film Piece by Piece, which opened in theaters last weekend. “I could actually play with his imagination in a way that I normally don’t have access to in documentary.”
On this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Neville tells me how Williams’ bold idea came together, from getting people like Snoop Dogg to re-enact scenes from the past — while being turned into an actual Lego dog, no less — to the negotiations with the Lego company to make sure that everything in the film could, in theory, exist in real life.
For example: Pusha T, another interviewee in the film, and his hair. “They said, ‘Sorry, these braids are too narrow,’” Neville says of the original character design. “‘They could break off and a child could choke.’ We said, ‘Yeah, but it’s a movie.’ We ended up actually talking to the manufacturing people about how many micrometers wide a Lego braid would have to be not to break off.”
Piece by Piece is currently playing in theaters around the country, an increasingly rare feat for any documentary. It scored rave audience reviews and $3.8 million in its first weekend, the fifth-best performing doc debut of the last decade. Neville has watched the documentary boom-and-bust cycle happen firsthand, and though he’s certain the “golden age of documentaries” circa 2017 will never return, he’s confident something else will emerge. “I think the big, shiny documentaries will always have a home,” he says. “My concern is [for] the small, passionate, niche documentaries that are some of my very favorite documentaries to make and to watch. Those are getting squeezed out, and that to me is really frustrating.”
This week’s podcast also includes a conversation with returning guest Chris Feil, who helps me look at the big picture of awards season and predict some of the drama that awaits us later in the year. Will a rivalry emerge? Will Clint Eastwood upset the apple cart yet again? We do our best to predict what’s ahead.