When Pharrell Williams was asked to do a documentary film about his career, he hesitated. Then he was told that he could do it however he wanted, and the prolific music producer/musician’s immediate thought was: It has to be told in Lego. An animated film with Lego pieces. No hesitation there.

“I remember being like ‘Oh, well, I’m totally going to break the system,’ ” he says during a Zoom call with the Golden Globes from Japan. “I’m totally going to do something different than what anyone has ever done before and I hope it works, but I think it will because it’ll be crazy. And I mean — why not?”

Yes, why not?

A lot of movies have been breaking boundaries this year. Aside from Williams’ movie Piece by Piece, many of them premiered at TIFF this year. They include Heretic, which blends the horror and comedy genre as it tells the story of two young missionaries, who knock on the door to the house that belongs to religion-sceptic Mr. Reeds played by Hugh Grant. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End pushes boundaries as an apocalyptic and very dark musical about the end of the world. And Michael Gracey’s Better Man is a biopic about the British popstar Robbie Williams, who is portrayed by a CGI-created monkey in the film. This led the British newspaper The Guardian to call it “one of history’s strangest biopics.”

Piece by Piece director Morgan Neville — behind documentary films such as Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, 20 Feet from Stardom and Won’t You Be My Neighbor? — had approached Pharrell Williams with the idea of making a documentary. The result is an animated movie that bends the rules of how to make a documentary and resulted in a mix of animation, documentary, biopic and musical. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

“I knew that I wanted to do it in a way that would be more universal,” adds Pharrell, the father of four, about the unique way of telling his story. “I wanted it in a way that my kids could understand it as I told it. And older people too. Lego is such a generational concept to so many people and whether you’re eight or eighty years old, you will see this and you will totally understand it. And the one thing I wanted is for people to realize that like it’s never too late for you to think about what your dream is and build it piece by piece. It’s literally what it was all about.”

Piece by Piece documents the life of Williams as told by him and his many collaborators such as Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg. They are all portrayed in Lego minifigures in the film and Williams made sure the Lego company created skin pigmentation and hair texture that would reflect their real-life counterparts. The film also includes many of William’s classics such as “Happy,” “Superthug” and “Frontin’ ” as well as the new song “Piece by Piece,” which includes the Princess Anne High School marching band, who also performed at the premiere in Toronto.

“My high school marching band was more like just me being like a little brat saying to myself: I want to do something crazy and I’ll put my high school band in there,” he says with a sly smile on his face. “That was the thing: I was just being mischievous and just bending the rules because I could.”

Whether Pharrell William’s fans would like the film or not was not a consideration.

“No, it is not their story,” the 51-year-old artist says firmly about his creative choice. “It’s my story, right? That is the whole point. I was telling it the way that I wanted to tell it.”

As for the other unconventional Williams (i.e. Robbie) biopic, Australian director and visual effects artist Gracey says, “I was just creatively looking for a new lens that format wise we had seen only a few times before,” says , who was also in the director’s chair of The Greatest Showman. “In doing that, I think some people might say that it was breaking boundaries, but for me it was a new creative angle. And interestingly for me, I think you see more of Robbie in the monkey than if he was played by a human.”

In the film, it is actor Jonno Davies, who via motion capture technology plays Robbie Williams as he grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, rose to fame with the boy-band Take That and got himself clean after many years of addiction and self-abuse. The idea to portray the world-famous musician as a monkey came from the director.

“This film is heavily based on a series of interviews that I did with Rob over the course of a year and a half,” Gracey tells the Golden Globes via Zoom. “When I went back to the original, raw recordings, I was taken by the many times he would refer to himself as a performing monkey. He would say something like: ‘I was just dragged up on stage to perform like a monkey.’”

When Gracey mentioned his intentions of portraying Williams as a monkey, the superstar, who is now 50 and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and four children, was immediately on board. The filmmakers went on to scan William’s eye, so the monkey has his eyes, and his voice is heard as voice-over.

“Any time he looks at you, it literally is Robbie looking out at you. You particularly see it when there is a close up of his eyes, which we have in some key moments in the film. You really do feel like it is Robbie looking at you, and because of Jonno Davies performance in terms of the nuances and the little details in the way that Robbie moves and his expressions fold, it is amazing how much of Robbie I see in that monkey.”

According to Gracey, Williams was ‘shellshocked’ after he saw the film the first time. He hugged him and was numb until he finally said: ‘That was a lot to take in.’ When he saw it with an audience at the premiere at TIFF, he had Davies in the seat next to him.

“During all the touching and heartbreaking moments, Rob would reach out to his knee and give it a little squeeze. I just watched that out of the corner of my eye and it was really beautiful, because he was sort of saying: Thank you.“

On stage after the screening, Williams choked up during the Q&A and had a hard time expressing how emotional watching the film with an audience was.

“You know something is wrong, when Rob has a hard time talking,” concludes Gracey with a laugh.