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Pharrell Williams has released the trailer to Piece by Piece, which chronicles his rise to musical fame. It features a reenactment of the conversation he had with director Morgan Neville when he pitched the idea to tell his story with Legos pieces, as well as scenes from his youth, accompanied with narration describing his passion for music.
“I loved music. It was mesmerizing to me,” Pharrell says in the clip. “I would see beautiful hues of light cascading. I just thought that’s what all Black kids did — they stared into the speaker like, ‘Whoa.'”
Pharrell’s story will officially come out in theaters Oct. 11, but it took some time for him to agree to do a documentary or biopic.
“Everyone was doing them at the time, and I was like, ‘Hell no.’ I never want to do what everybody else is doing,” Pharrell tells Variety. “Everybody’s taking the Lincoln Tunnel, then I want to take a plane. But when he finally said the magic words, ‘You can do it any way you want,’ I knew deep down inside that I wanted to do it through Lego.”
The end result, Pharrell says, is a film “not like any other movie.”
“It’s just its own film. It’s mind-blowing, in a way, the freedom that we were able to put together in the film, but that only works if you’re channeling your subject,” he says, adding it was designed “for anyone that just wanted to hear a good, aspirational, inspiring story told vividly, in a way that felt like it could apply to them personally.”
Also featured in Piece by Piece are Lego versions of Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg. “Everybody comes through so well. It’s so captivating when you see it,” Pharrell says.
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