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 see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

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

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.

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.

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.