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.
Joshua OppenheimerPerformance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?
Joshua OppenheimerThere's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.
Joshua OppenheimerI 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.
Joshua OppenheimerI need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative decisions.
Joshua OppenheimerWe 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.
Joshua Oppenheimer