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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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