Making a Tribeca-Featured Documentary: Benjamin Ree
Benjamin Ree is experiencing a lot of firsts this week: his first cinematic premiere of his first feature-length documentary — and his first appearance at Tribeca film festival. His film, Magnus, a profile of Magnus Carlsen, the great Norwegian chess player, is premiering.
His presence here is a surprise. The documentary began as a 5-minute short, that, as he recounts, “just grew and grew.” In the end, he had 300 hours of footage that took a year to edit into the final film, and his crew had grown from a one-man-band to a 9-person group, including two more cinematographers and another screenwriter. One of the producers, Kristoffer Metcalfe, was with him when we met up in the Tribeca Press Lounge on a sunny Wednesday.
There were 6,626 films submitted for consideration at Tribeca this year. To stand out, Ree thinks, you need something “a little different”. True, Magnus has a celebrity, but he and his team also harnessed different techniques to make a documentary that feels emotionally compelling. Their hope is to leverage their Tribeca success into a distribution deal in the US (they’ve already got some for 20 other countries). This will coincide with Magnus’ fall publicity tour for the World Chess Championships, which are being held in New York in November.
Their advice for a documentary filmmaker looking to make the jump to feature-length? Tell a great story and believe in it. Stamina is the most important thing, they say, especially when it comes to a feature-length story. Ree worked on the film while working at the news agency VGTV, and he says though he sometimes felt like giving up, he knew that the film would be wonderful, and would convey a deeper truth — about sport, about competition, and especially, about a young man’s battles. That powered him through, even through the struggles of working with Magnus and with the rigors of production.
Magnus Carlsen is a bit strange — well, he’s a chess player. The world of chess is highly insular, making a filmmaker’s challenge twofold: how to gain access to an introverted world, and how to, as Ree recounts, “convert introverted subjects and scenes into an intrinsically wishful, extraverted medium.” While he’d had documentary crews follow him before, Ree gained Magnus’ trust by showing up alone with a camera. Access, like most docs about fascinating people, was the key to making this documentary. Magnus is a celebrity, but an intensely private one; in order to convince him to commit to such a large project, Ree had to build trust, and part of that was ensuring that he knew that he could pull the plug whenever he wanted to.
Ree was the only journalist working on the film; the rest of the team had traditionally worked on narrative features. Though this occasionally created tension (Metcalfe and Ree laugh while trying to pick the right word), together, their focus was on making a documentary that felt cinematic, partially to allow it to play for traditional movie-going audiences while still conveying an authentic, realistic portrayal. They eschewed traditional documentary techniques — talking heads, voiceover, retrospective interview — in favor of following the narrative and capturing human emotions.
They had help: hundreds of hours of archival footage from Magnus’ childhood that gave a glimpse into him as a person, from the beginning of his chess career at 8 to the moment when, at 13 (after becoming the third-youngest Chess Grand Master in history), he declared he would become the Chess World Champion. This allowed them to build a natural character arc for Magnus, following him through his struggles with bullying, to his declaration that he was struggling with inner demons.
For inspiration, they looked to boxing movies, notably Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, and the seminal Rocky. Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon was key for teaching them how to create dramatic tension between two people staring at each other. The climax of the film is essentially that, when Magnus is at the Chess World Championship in India. Luckily, they had a natural conflict: Magnus is known for his playful, intuitive playing style, while his opponent, Viswanathan Anand, was backed by intensive practice and computer preparation. “Man vs. machine,” Ree laughed. “A classic conflict.”
To create tension as Magnus got more and more nervous, Ree allowed himself to slip into metaphor, something his team encouraged him to embrace (“We’re not interested in the truth, we’re interested in the story,” Metcalfe proffered by way of explanation). Ree elaborated: Magnus’ inner demons became portrayed by the press of journalists behind the glass wall separating them from the players. As the games progress and the tension rises the sound of the journalists rises and becomes deeper, until they become almost zombie-like; their bodies against the glass in a desperate struggle to watch them play become an obvious recollection of Magnus’ inner demons.
However, introversion also served as a way to create a more authentic portrayal of his struggles. “Magnus isn’t very self-aware,” Ree said. This meant that he wasn’t “playing himself” on camera — this is a struggle for many documentarians. For Ree, whose previous documentary shorts were about children, this was paramount to making a compelling film. “I’m passionate about authentic scenes,” he said. Magnus’ child-like nature (he still listens to the same music and plays the same games that he does in the archival footage) created just that, a deep authenticity.
Five years later, Ree is sitting in the Press Lounge at Tribeca, relaxed and happy. Metcalfe smiles. “Magnus told Benjamin once — and you don’t have to quote this — maybe it would be more interesting to make a film about a filmmaker making a film about a chess player.” That would certainly be something we all would see.
All photos and videos courtesy of Benjamin Ree.
