Most of Steen’s real-life story is told in the first ugly-cry third of Ibelin. And the tears don’t stop there: the rest movingly reconstructs his digital life in World of Warcraft, primarily through a mix of in-game animation and interviews with his friends, who were for years unaware of his condition. As it turns out, Steen had a handful of different love interests across the years and he was also a beloved member of a Warcraft guild called Starlight. The dialogue is taken verbatim from the actual conversations Steen and his friends had in-game, taken from an expansive online archive. They described their characters’ actions and emotional reactions in text form, too—that’s essentially what roleplaying is—and those records informed the animated sequences.
In one scene, we see Ibelin hanging out with a dwarven friend before a “dark-haired, mysterious beauty” approaches him to tease and flirt. (They would go on to date in-game, and the real-life woman behind the character, Lisette, is one of the film’s main talking heads.) In others he hangs around at the local tavern and other spots in the game world, listening intently to his friends woes, giving them his pixellated shoulder to cry on. Then there are the raids with the guild, slaying monsters and other nasties for their loot. But most touching are the scenes wherein Ibelin just runs endlessly, from one town to another—crystalizing just how much the game afforded him the chance to do things he couldn’t IRL.
“When I showed [the film] to the whole guild for the first time, I was very nervous,” Ree says. “After the screening, they told me, ‘That was exactly how we remember Ibelin. But you did one thing wrong…The women Ibelin liked to date, they had more leather clothes.’” Fortunately, they had time for a costume change or two before the animation was locked.
Earlier, after Ree had told me that Steen’s father had seen the film over 200 times, I asked him how that feels as a filmmaker—to know that he has had such a profound and direct impact on his family, and that he has played such a pivotal role in their grieving process. “I’ve been reflecting a lot on that in the last [few] years. In a way, it’s very moving to know that the film has meant so much to them, and it also feels like a huge responsibility. I’m glad I didn’t think too much about it when I started making this film.”
“One of the most difficult things with making films from real life is [that] films are such a reduction of life; it’s difficult to reduce life down to one hour and 43 minutes, and then still trying to keep the nuances, the complexities…I hope that that the impression left on the audience —who doesn’t know Mats or his family—will keep some of the nuances, and be representative.”
Making The Remarkable Life of Ibelin was, understandably, an emotionally draining experience for Ree. “I’ve never cried as much at work [as] working on this film. I feel very grateful that I got to study Mats’ life for four years. … I’ve been crying, and laughing, and been very inspired by him,” he says.
Such was the broad impact Steen has had on Ree, it’s difficult to summarize what he has learned from the last half-decade. “But one of the things that Mats has taught me is the value of asking, ‘How are you doing?’ But meaning it. How are you really doing?”
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
