Joshua Oppenheimer

“I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.”

“I'm sure it's one of the most frustrating aspects of human experience for all of us, that when we tell someone who's hurt us that they've hurt us, they tend to react with anger because they feel guilty, and we know we also get angry when we feel guilty.”

“Yes, it was difficult - making 'The Act of Killing' in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity.”

“People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.”

“The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition.”

“I came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union.”

“I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.”

“I think it's our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable.”

“You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.”

“For a long time, the Indonesian government ignored 'The Act of Killing,' hoping it would go away.”

“At our production company, the trademark dish - and this sounds particularly revolting - is curried pickled herring.”

“The filmmakers have a story they want to tell, and they go get the material they need for it. The film either exceeds or fails to meet up to their expectations or it's different.”

“I don't like to eat when I watch films because it distracts me. Anything crunchy or in a wrapper is terrible.”

“We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.”

“Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.”

“My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.”

“Although we can talk about an Indonesian democracy, or we can talk about democratic elections and democratic rituals - the trappings of democracy - we can't genuinely talk about democracy in Indonesia because there is not rule of law, and democracy without rule of law is a nonsense.”

“To put it crudely, 'The Act of Killing' would blast open the space for the more delicate film, 'The Look of Silence,' to do its work.”