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.

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.

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

People create the illusion of acting natural, which is what I think most documentarians do in part because of the direct cinema orthodoxies that came into play really in the '60s. That moment of performance is a tremendous opportunity to make visible something hitherto invisible, which is how people want to be seen. How do they see themselves? What are the scripts, fantasies, genres by which they imagine themselves? How is storytelling part of what we are as human beings? We wouldn't kill each other en masse if it weren't for storytelling. We wouldn't be able to live with ourselves.

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

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.