Why Pharrell Williams’ Lego biopic doesn’t reference Blurred Lines

In the film, you dramatise the moment Pharrell asked you to make the film in Lego, and your response is “Lego? Seriously?” How true to life was that?

The main difference is that when Pharrell said “Lego movie”, I thought, “Hell, yeah!”

I knew it was a crazy idea, but an exciting idea. I think it took me five minutes to fully buy into it.

Can you break it down for me? What was Pharrell’s pitch?

He basically said, “People have always wanted me to tell my story, and I’ve never been that interested, but I love your films, and I had the idea that you could make a documentary about me, and when you were done with it, you could throw away the visuals and do it again as Lego.”

That’s almost exactly what he said to me – but beyond that, he had no sense of what that meant, or what his story was. So I really had to think, what does that mean?

And one thing I instantly I realised is that it’s not just about taking the real-life documentary footage and making it Lego. It’s using what animation can do, which is time travel and go to outer space and all kinds of things that you can’t normally do in a documentary.

How quickly did it go from a crazy idea to reality?

It took us about a year from when we first met to starting production, because we had to meet with Lego and tell them about it.

How did the conversation with Lego go?

I said, “Look, it’s not a G-rated movie, but I get that it can’t be R-rated [either]. It’s something that has to have a little edge, and it’s going to get into questions of race and other things”.

And Lego, to their complete credit, said, “Those are conversations that are good for us to have.”

They knew it would push them, but in ways that they thought were good.

But they didn’t fund it, they don’t own it, they’re just partners.

What was the moment you knew it would work?

Well, we had to figure out how to get somebody to pay for it, so we did a 90 second proof of concept.

I interviewed Pharrell, and I cut together a scene of him listening to Stevie Wonder as a boy, on his parents’ stereo – and his synaesthesia kicks in. Suddenly there’s lots of colour and you can almost see what’s going on in his mind. That convinced me it would work.