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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.