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.

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.

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing.

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.

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.