Long, long before I became a filmmaker I was talking to killers. Filmmaking was an after thought.

I'm one simple way I think I've succeeded was capturing Elsa [Dorfman]. There's something about Elsa, her personality, and her work that I believe is there.

Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious.

If someone tells you that George Bush is not the 43rd president of the United States, they might be engaged in wishful thinking, or denial, but if they make that claim, it's either true or false! And you can assess that, regardless of whether there's an omniscient narrator, or an unreliable narrator, or it's shot in vérité, or it's manipulated, it's agitprop, whatever! It makes no difference! It's a style!

I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité.

Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.

I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence.