A Look Back at Piece By Piece’s Director Morgan Neville’s Documentaries

As a documentary filmmaker, Morgan Neville often explores the immeasurable depth of human creativity. In his new movie, Piece By Piece, Neville documents the life and times of Pharrell Williams as a LEGO animation. “When I had this crazy vision to tell this story through Lego bricks, I couldn’t have imagined a better partner than Morgan,” Williams explained in a press release in Variety. “He is a legend.” While maintaining the filmmaker’s high standard for research and interviews, the film creatively explores its unique format. “Neville manages to use the medium of the LEGO movie to quite literally piece elements together, mixing audio interviews, recreations of documentary footage both archive and contemporary, and even flights of imagination within this flexible system,” Collider writes.

For the last three decades, Neville has brought creativity and empathy to the genre of cultural documentaries. Although he often focuses on musicians—from Yo-Yo Ma to Johnny Cash—his real subject is human creativity. Neville told NPR, “Music is just the language we're speaking to tell a story about culture.” In 2014, Neville’s 20 Feet from Stardom won the Academy Award® for Best Documentary. To celebrate his new film, we’re showcasing two other remarkable documentaries.

Piece By Piece is now playing in theaters and available to watch at home.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Neville’s documentary about Mister Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, was inspired by a segment the TV educator did on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. “After seeing how he treated that subject, I knew not only that I could make a documentary about Mister Rogers, but that I had to,” Neville explained in a Focus Features exclusive interview. Neville wanted to go beyond a portrait of the man to find the message behind his actions. Neville explained to the Rogers family, “I don’t want to make a film about the biography of Fred. I want to make a film about the ideas of Fred Rogers,” the filmmaker told Vox.

To understand his ideas, Neville went through over 900 episodes of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, including outtakes, and did scores of interviews. Neville told PBS that he discovered that Rogers “was a man of iron will on a mission, and with a real vision.” For The New York Times, it is this philosophical “emphasis — the earnest, critical attention to the public Mister Rogers and his legacy — that makes Won’t You Be My Neighbor? feel like such a gift.” Rogers’ deep humanity and Neville’s empathetic treatment make it, as The Hollywood Reporter writes, “a documentary you want to hug.”

Watch Won't You Be My Neighbor? on Apple TV or Amazon now!

Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

In Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Neville explores the life of Anthony Bourdain, the chef and traveler who bared all on television but still remained an enigma to many. After going through more than 10,000 hours of footage of Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, No Reservations, and other shows, Neville conducted interviews with people who knew and worked with Bourdain to reconstruct the man behind the image. Neville told Entertainment Weekly, during production, “I kept saying, ‘I want to make a film Tony would like.’" To do that, Neville turned to Bourdain’s belief in radical honesty and respecting the paradoxes and contradictions of people. “Bourdain was his best at digging into nuances…This documentary does the same thing,” Vice writes. “What emerges is a raw, illuminating portrait of a man whose passions ranged as far and wide as his passport carried him,” writes Entertainment Weekly. Watch Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain on Apple TV or Amazon now!