If there's no magic of cinema, you only have the plain imagery of television. We are moving more and more towards a world devoid of meaningful experiences. We're going to the surface.

When I began research, I read the writings of the Sonderkommandos. They are not well known, but these prisoners wrote from the middle of hell from Auschwitz, to let the world know what happened. The texts were buried beneath the ground and found after the liberation of the concentration camps.

We have seen and do see the type of evil that is within human civilization, and the Holocaust took place in European history during an advanced state of technology and form of civilization, only to become an event in that history that questioned what civilization actually means.

Sometimes all we need is only listening to an inner voice and remaining human in a very personal way. But even if it is a personal way, it's still a very valid way - maybe the most valid way. It doesn't have to be a collective experience or someone telling you what to do. The most sacred human experience can be a very personal one.

I really wanted to take the viewer to the 'here and now' regarding the exterminations, and communicate directly in a visceral way. The art of cinema can communicate that way, and that's why I wanted to do it that way.

There's digital fatigue. When you can do everything, you can actually do nothing.

We have progressed in a technological sense, but I'm not so sure whether we have progressed in a civilizational matter - the quality of the civilization has not improved. It's a civilization that's in love with technology but forgetting about the human side of it and the destructive tendency in human civilization has not been faced.