Director Benjamin Ree On Drawing Inspiration From Faulkner, Dostoyevsky & Virginia Woolf For Oscar Contender ‘The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin’
For his Oscar-contending documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, filmmaker Benjamin Ree drew inspiration from literary sources as much or more than cinematic ones.
“One of my main interests is dramaturgy… and structure,” he says over a breakfast of an omelet and waffles in Amsterdam. “I’m obsessed with that, and I’ve been studying that my whole life.”
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In his Netflix film, Ree explores the journey of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a terminal condition that causes progressive weakening of the heart and skeletal structure. Despite the physical limitations caused by the disorder, Mats lived a rich life in the online World of Warcraft game – where his avatar was the powerfully built, able-bodied Ibelin. In that setting, Mats made many friends and impacted people far and wide, but his parents had no idea of their son’s vibrant virtual experiences until after his passing at the age of 25.
“The whole idea here is to find a structure that says something about grief,” Ree says of the narrative challenge. “And it does have what I call a symphonic, circular structure. And when I say symphonic, I mean that we tell the story like five to six times. [Initially], it’s basically told in the opening credits. Then it’s told by the family; it’s a traditional family, so they get a traditional form — talking heads and archive. Then it’s told again by Mats, and every time we tell a story from a different perspective, we get a new form. Mats gets this stream of consciousness montage kind of form. Then the film suddenly becomes an animated film. It’s told through Ibelin… The last time we tell this story, at the funeral, is told verbally.”
Pondering how to structure such a complex narrative, Ree turned the page to a Nobel Prize-winning American author.
“Some of it is inspired by the structure from Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner,” he reveals. “That [novel] is told many times from different perspectives.”
Further inspiration came from an analysis of another Faulkner classic.
“The Sound and the Fury; according to Faulkner, he tried to tell the story many times and he needed to include every of them from the different brothers. I think the level of complexity when you then tell the story from different brothers’ [perspectives] but set in different times and different forms each time, it’s a genius way of telling the story. And then the last chapter is a third person narrator that sees everything… The idea of having different kind of viewpoints, we do that in The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. And the last scene is at the funeral and then it’s told from a third-person view.”
For his film, Ree was able to draw from home videos of Mats Steen and from digital logs that tracked all of Mats’s interactions within the World of Warcraft environment. With help from an animator, the director reconstructed the moment-to-moment way Steen played the game and with whom he interacted.
“A unique story needs a unique form,” the filmmaker observes. “In [the documentary] you have a film within the film, which is the virtual world… an actual lived avatar life. That’s a coming-of-age story.”
He adds, “There’s a section where time passes by. We are rewinding it, but 10 years passes by very, very quickly. So, it’s all of these formal ideas. A lot of them I take from literature. The rewinding of the tapes is very inspired by To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.”
Another author Ree reveres – the famed Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
“One of my favorite books of all time is The Brothers Karamazov. And how that is structured is super interesting… The way the story floats, it’s like going down a river — you don’t know which direction it will go. It feels very free in the storytelling,” he says. “In a lot of forced dramaturgy, you know where the story will go. And in The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, we try to make that feeling of you don’t know… Not everything needs to be strict.”
Referencing a line attributed variously to Faulkner, Hemingway, George Orwell, or Oscar Wilde, Ree says, “You don’t need to ‘kill all your darlings,’ you need to have a lot of your darlings as well to give it air and keep it surprising, I think. So that’s the idea. And it’s not always easy to do that in film because you have shorter time. But I do like it when stories are unexpected, surprising, but I think it should also do that in form.”
At the Sundance Film Festival, where the documentary premiered, it won the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary, and Ree won the Directing Award in that category. It has won numerous prizes around the world, including Best Film at the Amanda Awards in Ree’s (and Mats Steen’s) native country of Norway. The film has been a big hit there.
“We had a theatrical [release] in Norway, 120,000 people watched it in the cinemas, which is a lot. It’s like 4 percent of our population of people over 10 years old,” he notes. “In Norway, I met teenagers that came up to me after screenings. A 15-year-old said, ‘I don’t have any friends in real life. All of my friends are in the virtual world, through gaming, and thank you so much for making this film. Now I can show it to my parents, and they will understand my life better.’”
Great literature stands the test of time, but there are ways in which the medium of cinema can eclipse the written word – at least, say, a news story drafted about the remarkable life of Mats Steen.
“That’s the great thing about documentary films and films in general — you can tell stories visually and emotionally — something different than reading about it descriptively,” Ree observes. “And I think that makes the audience resonate and understand. There’s many different ways of understanding. You can understand something more emotionally by watching a film than reading something about it.”
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