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.

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

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.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction. If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful. I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions.