When Mats Steen died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy at the age of 25 in 2014, he left behind the passwords to a rich life that he had lived online as his condition worsened, much of it in the Starlight guild of the multiplayer game “World of Warcraft.” His family was unaware that as his avatar, Ibelin, Mats had a wide array of friends — but they let director Benjamin Ree (“The Painter and the Thief”) document their son’s life through home movies and interviews but also through detailed animation that re-creates his world inside the video game.
Ree’s film, “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” won audience and directing awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and landed a deal with Netflix.
I understand you had a connection with Mats’ family that led you to make this film.
Yeah. Mats’ uncle was my main teacher at school. He taught me filmmaking when I was 11, and he played in a lot of my amateur films when I was a teenager. He then published an article about Mats’ life in 2019. I thought it was a brilliantly written piece, but I didn’t think of it as a visual story or a cinematic story. I called him to tell him how much that article meant to me, and then he told me that his brother had filmed Mats his whole life, from the day he was born.
That was when I thought of the idea of maybe making a documentary. So I contacted the family. They were very unsure if they wanted to be part of it, but they said that I could digitize the footage they had. The first footage I saw was Mats as a baby, eight months old. And right beside Mats was another baby that looked like me as a baby. I thought, Haha, what a coincidence. I called my mother and asked her, and she sent me a picture of Mats and me in a playpen together.
Knowing how sensitive this story is for his parents must have put a burden on you.
It’s a huge responsibility. That is something I thought about a lot, how to make a nuanced and complex portrayal of him and his life. That was extremely important to me, so we were in the editing room for two years. We had 30 test screenings in a theater, because when you work on a film for so many years, you get blind. I didn’t know what I was seeing anymore.
Dramaturgy and documentary filmmaking is not only making artistic choices but also ethical choices because of the subtext of each scene and the impression you leave with the audience. Making a film like this is a huge reduction of life itself, but it’s possible to reduce that down and still keep nuances and complexities and make it an authentic representation of who Mats was. That was always the goal.
And so we used those test screenings to see how the audience viewed Mats. How is he regarded by people who did not know him after watching the film? They would give us feedback and we would adjust.
Was it always your plan to re-create the world inside the game?
That was the whole idea. A unique story needs a unique structure and form. This is the first time a film is re-creating an actually lived-out avatar life. There have been many documentaries from games, but they filmed the game as you see it. Here, we are trying to invite everyone in by making animations out of that role-playing dialogue. And that’s never been done before. It is a reconstruction of the game, but it’s done authentically. Dialogue is the real dialogue. The places and characters, we’re trying to represent the gaming experience in the most authentic way possible.
But you didn’t have the rights to re-create the “World of Warcraft” universe, right?
No. That was a bold choice, of course. We made the film without asking for permission to use that world. We asked afterward when we had almost locked it. We had a version of the film we were really happy about after working on it for three years. Then we contacted them and said, “We have been making this film and we use your world. Can we get that for free and without any involvement from you?”
They asked if they could watch the film, so we traveled to Irvine (in Southern California) and showed them the film. And it went very well. I was very nervous because we didn’t have a plan B. I had to take some extra doses of asthma medicine and my hands were shaking before that meeting. But the boss just told us, “This film is fantastic. You will get the rights for free.”
A version of this story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries/International issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
