Joshua Oppenheimer

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I always have said, you know it's not for me to forgive or to condemn, I'm a filmmaker.

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

— Joshua Oppenheimer

In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. In a documentary, we know that we're watching a drama…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I really believe that the past is beyond our grasp and what is essential about the past is something unspeakable.

— Joshua Oppenheimer

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

— Joshua Oppenheimer

A podium is something you walk up to, you say what you want to say and when you're finished, you leave.

— Joshua Oppenheimer

Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I've become more forgiving, even though I have no patience at all for denial, justification of wrong, rationalization. I've become virtually a…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

People create the illusion of acting natural, which is what I think most documentarians do in part because of the direct cinema…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

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

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I think we need to make documentaries about fantasy and storytelling. I think I just started to scratch the surface of a…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction. If you acknowledge…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

The killers have built the society. The whole Indonesia is their platform. They run the country. They run the country.

— Joshua Oppenheimer

In Indonesian, the word isn't translating as "gangster." It's "preman", which comes from the Dutch "préman", which of course the thing that's…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I don't believe you can make an honest film about another person in all their complexities from a place of distance. You…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

When you approach someone as a human being, truly and try to be as open as safety allows, some of the bigger…

— Joshua Oppenheimer

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and…

— Joshua Oppenheimer