I don't believe you can make an honest film about another person in all their complexities from a place of distance. You can make a journalistic report, you can judge someone from a distance, but you can't really get to… — 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
I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share
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
We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share
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
I really believe that the past is beyond our grasp and what is essential about the past is something unspeakable. — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share
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
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
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
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
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
I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share
Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience? — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share
I've become more forgiving, even though I have no patience at all for denial, justification of wrong, rationalization. I've become virtually a pacifist, so… — Joshua Oppenheimer Copy Share
