At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Work Men Art

The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Vital Use Us

We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it's what makes us we are. It's what delineates the borders of our societies.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Art Will Way

You see, 'The Look of Silence' is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It's normally never done because it is too dangerous.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Power Pet Anger

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Truth Movies Wit

I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'

Joshua Oppenheimer

Pet Watching Watch

For my part, as a filmmaker, I've never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it's a lie.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Men Art Wall

My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Men Who USA

What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Power Art Wit

I still receive very regular death threats that make it impossible for me to return to Indonesia. I think I could get in, but I don't think I could get out again.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Death Very Turn

All we can do is find the courage to stand still and to look backwards.

Joshua Oppenheimer

War Courage Age

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Life Imagination Age

Waking from any fever dream, one retains, above all, impressions seared into memory.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Waking T Sea

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

Joshua Oppenheimer

You Wonderful Wonder

No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there.

Joshua Oppenheimer

T Presence Me

At our production company, the trademark dish - and this sounds particularly revolting - is curried pickled herring.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Art UN Trademark

Military rule in Indonesia formally ended in 1998, but the army remains above the law.

Joshua Oppenheimer

T Rule Remains

I think, if you're in the United States, we've seen people trying to speak out in different ways and trying to make themselves heard about the United States' failure to move on generationally, given the long-festering wound of our history around race.

Joshua Oppenheimer

History Failure You

I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Men UN T

I think that indignation is pleasurable, and it's pleasurable because it's self-righteous.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Use Us Think

Cinema is, of course, the great storytelling medium of modernity.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Great Tory Telling

You cry the first tear because something is genuinely, singularly upsetting. And you cry the second tear because everybody is crying that first tear with you, and you know that.

Joshua Oppenheimer

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I think it's our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable.

Joshua Oppenheimer

If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I have a British and an American passport.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I didn't really get any rigorous background in film history.

Joshua Oppenheimer

At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.

Joshua Oppenheimer

'The Look of Silence' is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It's distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Yes, it was difficult - making 'The Act of Killing' in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I don't think there's a morally perfect way to do anything in life, but I'm not a filmmaker who tries to hide my mess.

Joshua Oppenheimer

From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting 'The Act of Killing' and then editing it.

Joshua Oppenheimer

In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship.

Joshua Oppenheimer

To put it crudely, 'The Act of Killing' would blast open the space for the more delicate film, 'The Look of Silence,' to do its work.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I wanted to resist in 'The Look of Silence' making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors.

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 start new forms of social activism.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union.

Joshua Oppenheimer

What I've always been most interested in is exposing the way stories and fantasies reconstitute our everyday reality. What appears to be non-fiction is not only totally mysterious, unfathomable, and strange when you really look at what it is.

Joshua Oppenheimer

My first memory of cinema is my mother taking me to see 'Silkwood,' which is about a whistleblower at a nuclear power plant.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I'm against escapist entertainment.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I don't like to eat when I watch films because it distracts me. Anything crunchy or in a wrapper is terrible.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I don't drink in the cinema because I have a bladder the size of a hummingbird.

Joshua Oppenheimer

We all identify with the people we see, and in a good documentary, we are not just reading an account of the world, we're seeing and hearing our world.

Joshua Oppenheimer

In calling someone a bad guy, I reassure myself that I'm good. I elevate myself. I call it the 'Star Wars morality'. And unfortunately, it underpins most of the stories we tell.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Joshua Oppenheimer

I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Millions of Indonesians who live with secrets in their family who have a sense of that kind of secret that their parents never told them, want to be told about what happened so they can know where they come from.

Joshua Oppenheimer