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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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