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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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