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… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
Direct cinema is about simulating a reality in which you're not having the overwhelming influence that you really are having. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
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… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
I really believe that the past is beyond our grasp and what is essential about the past is something unspeakable. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
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… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
A podium is something you walk up to, you say what you want to say and when you're finished, you leave. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course accept those… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they went through… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share Image
