Denial, panic, threats, anger - those are very human responses to feeling guilt.

The whole tradition of cinema is dominated, really, by films about good guys versus bad guys, good versus evil. But we have very few films about the nature of evil itself.

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

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

Each and every perpetrator was boastful, usually they would invite me to the places where they killed and I would of course accept those invitations because I could document what happened that way.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

After the Dutch left Indonesia, after the Indonesians got loose in 1945, the freemen were not as widely used, but then they went through a real Renaissance where military dictatorship took over.

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

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

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

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

Look forward with confidence and backwards with attitude.

All paradises are there to be expelled from.

Try to leave the Earth a better place than when you arrived.

Never be ashamed of what you feel. You have the right to feel any emotion that you want, and to do what makes you happy. That's my life motto.

Uncertainty that comes from knowledge (knowing what you don't know) is different from uncertainty coming from ignorance.

The world is a strange and wonderful place.

In real life, I'm afraid of heights - and people who get moral convictions... Adolf Hitler in London.

The only reason to buy a paper book any longer is to own it and cherish it and remember it and tell a story about it.

The 30-year-old male is about as far away from Valentine's Day as you can get in the human experience.

I’ve never believed in risking what my family and friends have and need in order to pursue what they don’t have and don’t need.