Pharrell Williams cannot stand the idea of looking at his face or hearing his voice at a movie theater. The award-winning singer even balks at hearing himself on a voicemail. That presented a problem when the idea of making a biopic was raised. “I just did not find my story particularly interesting,” Williams says. People say, ‘Well, oh, you're an entertainer. You hear your voice all the time.’ But I've always felt that way about my voice. I just do what I do for other people. “Trust me, I see the video once. I don't watch my own videos. I don't read my interviews. I don't because it's that for me. And most entertainers have enough vanity where they can do it. But my objectivity is different because I'm a producer. So, I have a very high standard of what performance should be and how good I feel like people should be and what they should do, and so it can be debilitating to me.” Williams balked at a biopic, but his agent kept pressing the matter. Only when the agent told Williams he could make the film anyway he wanted that opened the door to the unique approach. Despite his concerns, there had to be a way to show the life of the cultural icon that he would accept. The solution came in the form of tiny plastic bricks. “Piece By Piece,” set to open in theaters on Oct. 11 presents a journey through the life of Williams told through the lens of LEGO animation. The film includes interviews with Jay-Z, Missy Elliott, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar. Academy Award-winning director Morgan Neville took the animation approach to chart the path for Williams from being a restless youngster living in Virginia Beach to a multi-hyphenate artist and producer. “I wanted my kids to understand my story. We always buy them LEGO sets from our triplets to our oldest. That's what I played with when I was a child,” Williams says. “My earliest fondest remembrance of having toys, it's my parents buying me LEGO sets.” The first thing he had to do was convince Neville the concept would work. Then he had to get permission for the LEGO company to use their product. The last step was getting executives at Focus Features and Universal Studios to agree to the approach. Once everyone agreed, Williams had a moment when he realized that what they were doing should have been impossible, but his efforts made the impossible possible. Neville understood why Williams wanted such a different approach. The director disagrees with the idea that the concept gives Williams a way to hide. “I actually feel like, in a weird way, LEGO got us closer because not only is it what you see with your eye, it's what you see with your mind's eye. And so suddenly, we can be inside his head,” Neville says. “We can see the colors he sees, we can see the beats, we can do all these things you can't normally do in a documentary. “So, in that way, it was opening a door of possibility of all the things we could do to actually, in a way, get more into the creativity, but also in a way more intimate in that kind of storytelling. “ Using the colorful bricks gave Neville a chance to explore how Williams sees music as a portal to another dimension filled with wondrous swirls of sound and color that immersed him in another version of the world. Williams is a recording artist, producer, songwriter, philanthropist, entrepreneur and Creative Director for Louis Vuitton menswear with 10 billion combined global music streams to date. He has picked up 13 Grammy Awards and received two Academy Award nominations for his original song “Happy” (“Despicable Me 2”) and for Best Picture-nominated “Hidden Figures” as a producer. In 2018, Williams narrated Universal’s remake of the classic film “The Grinch,” authored the book A Fish Doesn’t Know It’s Wet and released the Netflix Original series “Brainchild.” Other projects include “Dope,” “Roxanne Roxanne,” “Voices of Fire” and “Harlem.” The biopic is the latest example of how hard Williams pushes himself. That drive comes naturally to him. “I think people are born with lots of things. Sometimes people are born with creativity. I think everyone's born with creativity, but some people are born with a pronounced connection to it,” Williams says. “Then there are people who are born with drive and all of them are achievable, but sometimes you're not. “And then there are people who are born with both. I didn't know I had this kind of drive. In fact, I considered myself lazy for years. And it took me years to understand that it wasn't that I was lazy, I was just not inspired.”