Last week’s installment of SHOOT’s The Road To Oscar Series includes reflections from varied directors who have broken new ground in their films–from Steve McQueen with Blitz to RaMell Morris in Nickel Boys, Jason Reitman with Saturday Night, and Morgan Neville in Piece by Piece.
The latter feature, though, has a unique precedent-setting aspect to it in that Piece by Piece is in the awards season conversation across two normally mutually exclusive categories–Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature.
Piece by Piece tells the story of composer/musician/performer Pharrell Williams–through LEGO animation. Audio interviews with Williams and collaborators like Kendrick Lamar and Missy Elliott relate moments that come to life via LEGO-constructed visuals.
Neville described the film as “creative nonfiction.” It’s a hybrid of disciplines–documentary and animation–which are masterfully meshed despite philosophically being inherently contradictory. Neville had to grapple with these contradictory elements, balancing their virtues to do justice to Williams’ story. “I realized early on that animation is the opposite instinct of documentary. The director is ‘God’ in animation. In documentaries,” quipped Neville, “the director can barely decide where to put the camera.”
Neville finds a beauty in the restrictions of the documentary form, the lack of control. He wanted to retain that lack of control at times within the animation framework, subtly looking at the friction between having control and the lack thereof, adding an artistic dimension of human realism to the film. Whereas animation of objects such as LEGOs conventionally deploys great handheld camera work, Neville on occasion wanted the camera work to be a bit jagged, with jump cuts and missed focus, even audio boom poles in the shots, different aspect ratios–flaws that are not uncommon in a documentary.
Neville and animation director Howard Baker built a rapport, discussing everything from production design to character design. At first, Neville said he and Baker were kind of like “two flavors that don’t go together.” But they both evolved. Neville expressed the need to honor the imperfections of documentary filmmaking while gaining respect for the incredible artistry and transformative powers of animation. “Howard became much more attuned to the documentary form. I became much more attuned to animation,” said Neville who wound up appreciating what he described as “the nonstop drip of animation. Every morning there are 20 shots to look at and get notes on. You can go a little bit crazy doing that. It’s a micro-focus. But I really got into it.”
Robert Goldrich is an editor with SHOOTonline.
