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

In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. In a documentary, we know that we're watching a drama unfold in the world because of the movie we're watching that is real. That has enormous stakes for the whole society, and we, by the act of watching, complete the story.

After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they went through a real Renaissance where military dictatorship took over.

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

I really believe that the past is beyond our grasp and what is essential about the past is something unspeakable.

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

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