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.

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.

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?

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

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.

Time does not heal, but it can liberate. A race run well can never be lost.

...to the last I grapple with thee

Logic takes care of itself

What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.

Modi government has not flouted any rule or regulation to help anyone.

All of my own impulses to balance and move seemed to conflict with those of the guards, and I was jerked and jostled down the portico, just as graceful as a sick cat.

Research is always a high priority in my fiction. Songs, fashion, politics, television, movies, trends - I try to get those details right.

You got to choose between tightening your belt or losing your pants.