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“This Film is Done by YouTubers”: Benjamin Ree on The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin In 2020’s The Painter and the Thief, Norwegian director Benjamin Ree told the story of the unlikely friendship between artist Barbora Kysilkova and heroin addict Karl-Bertil Nordland through overlapping, sometimes contradictory points of view. He has used this approach again for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a telling—and repeated retelling—of the short life of Mats Steen, a young, disabled Norwegian gamer who died in 2014 from the rare degenerative disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy. While his loving family was devoted to giving Steen the best life he could have, in the immediate aftermath of his death they grieved the fact that his existence had been a lonely one. But after making his death public, Mats’s family received a remarkable outpouring of condolences from gamers around the world who Mats had connected with through World of Warcraft, where he inhabited the role of a character named Ibelin.
Ree read about Mats’s online life some years later, setting him on a journey which led to a Sundance premiere and recent global Netflix release. Thanks to a number of fortunate archival discoveries, including a transcription of World of Warcraft interactions running to some 42,000 pages, Ree retells the story of Mats’s life through multiple perspectives—not just abundant home movies, but through a meticulously reconstructed animation of his online existence as Ibelin, as well as the accounts of far-flung friends and family still mourning his loss.
In advance of its Netflix release, Filmmaker spoke via Zoom with Benjamin Ree.
Filmmaker: Can you tell me more about how you came to the project?
Ree: I read about Mats’s Ibelin life through an article published in 2019 by the Norwegian Broadcaster NRK, published on my Facebook by Mats’s uncle. He was my teacher at school [and] the one that introduced me to filmmaking. I cried a lot because it made a huge impression on me; I never thought that I would make a film out of it. I just called Mats’s uncle and told him how much that story meant to me. That was when he told me, “My brother has filmed Mats’s whole life from the day he was born, and they communicated inside World of Warcraft in text form, and they stored a lot of that.” That was the first time I thought that maybe it’s possible to make a documentary film where we can recreate an avatar life in retrospect. That’s when I approached Mats’s parents and asked if they wanted to be a part of this project. Mats’s father said “Yes, I filmed his whole life.” He hadn’t digitized the footage, so I got all these VHS tapes and DV tapes and digitized them myself, and the first footage I saw was Mats as a baby. Right beside Mats was another baby, and I was laughing at a bit because I thought it looked like me as a baby. Everyone can kind of remember how they looked like a baby from pictures—it was a bit of the same feeling. But then I saw my parents there, so I understood: it actually is me together with Mats as a baby in a playpen! I was shocked: I am at the beginning of this project, I never knew that I had met him, and I am there together with him.
Filmmaker: So you didn’t know that you knew him at all at that point. You just knew his uncle?
Ree: Yes, I knew that my parents and Mats’s parents had been in the same group of friends back in the late ’80s. But my parents moved away from Oslo when I was one, then lost contact with them. So, I knew nothing about him growing up. I am not a religious person, but I almost felt this is kind of meant to be.
My pitch to the parents was that I wanted to tell a story about grief, about how they had to reevaluate their son’s life. I also wanted to tell a coming-of-age story inside that game, and I wanted everyone to be included in it so even my grandmother, who is 94, would understand this virtual world. At the same time, I wanted that world to be representative of the game, so the gamers would feel it’s a good representation of the game they have been playing.
Mats’s parents said that they actually didn’t know if they wanted to make a documentary because it was like opening a wound for them, the sorrow was so huge. They were calculating the risk of the emotional difficulties of talking about their son, wondering if they had the energy to do that, and that’s very understandable. At the same time, they also knew that Mats wanted to be known. Since he lived such a short life, he wanted to be remembered. So, after two weeks of them thinking and discussing, they told me that they wanted to be part of this project. Now they have seen the film over 100 times. They watch it at every screening and they’ve used the film as part of the healing process.
Filmmaker: I was astonished to hear that this film went through thirty test screenings. How does that happen and how do you cope with that?
Ree: Those test screenings are extremely important, because we worked in the editing room for two years with these editors and animators, and it’s a complex film to make because of the structure, so we needed to test it a lot. And making a documentary film like this, how you tell the story is not only artistic choices but also ethical choices, because it’s real people and most of them have no experience with media. They have never been public people. So, the way the audience regard them and the impression they’re left with, it’s so important that that feels nuanced and representative. I don’t think it’s possible to strive for objectivity in a film like this. Film is such a huge reduction of life itself, but in that reduction, we’re trying to keep the nuances and complexities and make a representation that feels authentic.
Filmmaker: How important was it to you that the audience understands its documentary underpinnings, even as we move into the genre of animation?
Ree: Extremely important. I think one of the reasons why we get invested into this Warcraft world is because we know that the places where they met are the exact places; everything they’re saying is the right thing. Because of this huge archive, we could tell the story as it happened. But of course, it’s a reconstruction, because if we just filmed the game, you just see a lot of text coming up on screen. It will be very uncinematic and feel very exclusionary as well. So, our goal here was to invite everyone in, and the way we’re doing that is that we are interpreting the written text as well. What’s fascinating with Mats and his friends is that they are role players, so they communicated in text form details about actions and expressions. So, Mats would, for example, write “Ibelin seems sincere yet sullen”—that gives us a possibility to interpret that. The transcript looks like a very, very detailed movie script.
Filmmaker: Is it right to say that you had a another big discovery when you realized that they had been keeping these scripts, because they don’t always keep scripts like this?
Ree: Yes, that’s very rare, actually, because role players are just a small percentage of the people playing World of Warcraft. You have to use external programs in order to store it. We were extremely lucky with this project. This is a documentary told in retrospect about a non-celebrity. Celebrities have a lot of footage and archival material, and here a normal and unusual young Norwegian gamer left so much detail about his life. His father filmed everything, he was a part of a short informational documentary before he passed away, he wrote a blog. We had 42,000 pages, online dialogue covering eight years of his life, and the funeral was also filmed. If you had left out one of those elements, we could not make this film.
Filmmaker: How much did playing around with points of view in The Painter and the Thief inform your process here?
Ree: That’s always a way I like to tell stories. I get to look at the story from different angles. A unique story like this also needs a unique form and structure. The story here is about grief, and grief comes in waves—at least, that’s how I experience grief. You revisit the person who’s left the earth, you revisit the person you’re grieving and you visit that story many times in different stages. This film tells the story of Mats many times: in the opening title sequence, very quickly; then again by Mats’s family, in a traditional form with talking heads and archive; then we rewind and tell it again from Mats’s perspective. There’s a lot of humor; it’s stream of consciousness. Then the film changes completely and becomes an animated film. We tell the virtual story about Ibelin, then we tell it again from lots of friends’ perspectives. So, each time we tell the story, we jump a time change [and] perspective, and we introduce a new form, and the last time we tell the story is at the funeral, and then it’s told verbally. It all leads up to the funeral, because that’s when the two worlds meet.
Filmmaker: At what point did Netflix come on board?
Ree: We were in talks with Netflix a few months before Sundance, then they bought it right before Sundance. The film was funded by public government money, and also private investors, in Norway. We managed to make the film for about $1 million, which is not that much if you think about how much animation there is.
Filmmaker: How do you prepare for a release on a global platform like this?
Ree: To be honest, I don’t know. Personally, I feel really happy that the film will come out on Netflix and reach as many people as possible. I think this is a biopic about an unusual but also a normal Norwegian gamer, and that makes me very happy. I love celebrity documentaries myself—I have made them—but some celebrities have two to three documentaries already. So, to give a voice to someone like Mats Steen and have that voice reach the whole world, I think that’s fantastic, and I think the story is really worth telling. You know, Mats was as sick as it’s possible to get. He could only move his fingers towards the end of his life, but he helped his friends fundamentally. This core story feels so urgent and so important to tell, and I really want as many as possible to watch the film as possible.
Filmmaker: When you’re preparing this for people to be watching on television with a remote control, do you expect them to be able to pause at any time? When I was scrolling through the sequence with the condolence messages, I found myself pausing and reading them in depth. It was almost like it was a DVD extra that allows you to go deeper into the film. Do you think about that in the edit?
Ree: That’s the first time I’ve gotten that question! To be honest, we haven’t thought about it in that way and it’s interesting to hear that you stop and read them. There’s a lot of things going on in the background, so we tried to get the details right. I hope that the gaming community will notice a lot of details in the background that we have been working a lot with to get right.
Filmmaker: Tell me about how you got YouTubers to make the animation.
Ree: I have never played World of Warcraft before, never made an animation film before, so this was all new to me. When we started this project, I was freaking out a bit: “What have I done? What have I got myself into? I don’t know anything about this world!” I met with a boss of an animation company that we really loved in Stockholm, Rasmus Tukia. After drinking one pint, he told me that it’s actually only him working in that company. He did all the 3D animation for this film alone from his parents’ place. Because of this film, he’s earned enough money that he has now moved away from home. This is his first job, together with all the YouTubers. They helped out with rendering and rigging and typing and background characters. So, you can say that this film is done by YouTubers—the animation is done by YouTubers, basically, and it’s their first job. But they knew the world very well, as they had spent at least 20,000 hours playing that game, and I think it was a perfect match because I did not know anything. I could be the one that asked silly questions, and they gave me the answers.
Filmmaker: Did you have any interaction with World of Warcraft, or is there any type of IP involved?
Ree: Initially, we just took their IP without asking for permission—like one producer said, “We did it the Norwegian way.” Almost three years into making the film, we contacted them and said, “We have been making this film. Can we show it to you, and can we get the rights for free without involvement from you?” I was extremely nervous about it. We traveled to California and showed them the film. I had to take some extra doses of asthma medicine before the screening, because I could almost not breathe—three years of working on this project with no plan B. Fortunately, after the screening, the boss looked at us and he said “This film is fantastic. We will give you the rights.” That’s the way we did it.
