Documentary Director Morgan Neville Swears Off AI After Controversy

'Piece by Piece' Director Morgan Neville Will Never Use AI Again

Morgan Neville knows not everything we talk about will make it into this story. After making dozens of documentaries, he knows that in order to be told properly, the best stories have to leave some parts out. That's definitely true of Piece by Piece, his new "creative nonfiction" documentary about Pharrell Williams. Built using audio interviews with collaborators like Kendrick Lamar and Missy Elliott -- many of which Neville conducted remotely during Covid-19 lockdowns -- it's a biopic of Williams' life animated entirely with Lego. Because Williams' career as a hitmaker spans 30-plus years, and given the fact that animation is expensive, Neville knew he had to leave some stuff out. "People say, 'Oh, the interviews are so great.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, I used the good ones,'" he says, sitting in a restaurant off of Central Park, a few days before Piece by Piece's New York premiere. "They don't know all the interviews that I didn't use or parts of interviews. So there's that part of it too." So what pieces are missing? A story Williams told about getting a call from Michael Jackson, what happened when Justin Timberlake visited the Neptunes' studio in Virginia Beach. It actually ends right as Williams is starting to get deep. But that's the thing with movies: They can only tell you so much. Same is true of this interview. Still, when WIRED sat down with Neville, we covered a lot, from his next movie about Paul McCartney's post-Beatles era to why his experience using artificial intelligence on his Anthony Bourdain documentary made him swear off the tech for good.

Director Morgan Neville is steering clear of generative AI after 'Roadrunner' backlash | TechCrunch

One of the most attention-grabbing aspects of "Roadrunner," the Morgan Neville-directed documentary about Anthony Bourdain, was Neville's use of generative AI to replicate Bourdain's voice. Looking back now, Neville told Wired that he saw this as a "fun" way to "keep [Bourdain's] voice going in the film." But his approach drew intense criticism -- while the synthetic Bourdain only read words that the real Bourdain had actually written, Neville said many viewers assumed, "Oh, they just made [expletive] up." "Many people told me that there were other documentary projects that were doing the same thing, that all reacted; they either changed what they were doing or put giant disclaimers over everything," he said. Since then, the director has "assiduously avoided" using AI. Even in his new documentary "Piece by Piece," in which he dramatizes musician Pharrell's life with Legos (yes, really), Neville was careful to steer clear. "Carl Sagan in [Piece by Piece] says, 'Pharrell' and I was very clear to everybody that we were, with permission of his widow, going to make him say 'Pharrell' without using AI," Neville said. "We actually experimented to construct the word from syllables [he actually said]."