Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

In Indonesian, the word isn't translating as "gangster." It's "preman", which comes from the Dutch "préman", which of course the thing that's "freeman" in English.

Direct cinema is about simulating a reality in which you're not having the overwhelming influence that you really are having.

I think we need to make documentaries about fantasy and storytelling. I think I just started to scratch the surface of a method that allows us to do that. We want to be sucked into the events, suspend our disbelief and imagine that this is a fiction, but actually putting onscreen the gap between who the people are and who they want to be and therefore opening the question about why they want to be this person.

Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?

I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction. If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful. I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions.

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing.

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior.

A podium is something you walk up to, you say what you want to say and when you're finished, you leave.

The killers have built the society. The whole Indonesia is their platform. They run the country. They run the country.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

When you approach someone as a human being, truly and try to be as open as safety allows, some of the bigger reenactments with a whole army of paramilitary people participating, I couldn't say my feelings openly in front of everybody, without it being dangerous for my crew.

People create the illusion of acting natural, which is what I think most documentarians do in part because of the direct cinema orthodoxies that came into play really in the '60s. That moment of performance is a tremendous opportunity to make visible something hitherto invisible, which is how people want to be seen. How do they see themselves? What are the scripts, fantasies, genres by which they imagine themselves? How is storytelling part of what we are as human beings? We wouldn't kill each other en masse if it weren't for storytelling. We wouldn't be able to live with ourselves.

I really believe that the past is beyond our grasp and what is essential about the past is something unspeakable.

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative decisions.

After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they went through a real Renaissance where military dictatorship took over.

Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course accept those invitations because I could document what happened that way.

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.

I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker.

I don't believe you can make an honest film about another person in all their complexities from a place of distance. You can make a journalistic report, you can judge someone from a distance, but you can't really get to know them.

I've become more forgiving, even though I have no patience at all for denial, justification of wrong, rationalization. I've become virtually a pacifist, so I feel that no atrocity is ever justified. I've become more vigilant about evil. I think I recognize its seeds more quickly. I see its source.

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.

In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. In a documentary, we know that we're watching a drama unfold in the world because of the movie we're watching that is real. That has enormous stakes for the whole society, and we, by the act of watching, complete the story.

I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the real, in a way. It's like white light - if you put everyday reality through a prism you get this rainbow of colors that you couldn't see before. I'm interested in exploring the world to show the things that are invisible. And not just undocumented aspects of reality, but to actually make manifest things that have been hitherto invisible through the intervention of filmmaking.