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.

I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker.

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.

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.

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.

I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the real, in a way. It's like white light - if you put everyday reality through a prism you get this rainbow of colors that you couldn't see before. I'm interested in exploring the world to show the things that are invisible. And not just undocumented aspects of reality, but to actually make manifest things that have been hitherto invisible through the intervention of filmmaking.

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.