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

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.

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.

A seed only begins to manifest its greatest potential the day it is buried in dirt.

You tell me that yes, I can do it. I know. And I may do it, if I so choose.You tell me that no, I cannot. I say, Oh? I shall do it, since you refuse!

It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one's acts.

Keep true to the dreams of your youth.

If I can be serious now, and I have the feeling I can.

The first end I propose in our daily work is to do the will of God; secondly, to do it in the manner he wills it; and thirdly to do it because it is his will.

Afraid to Die Loveless Because I think if you die without knowing love in this life, that's how you'll spend eternity. Alone. Frozen.

People of a lively imagination are generally curious, and always so when a little in love.

I'm not doing the run to become rich or famous.

If you don't want to be stabbed in the back you should be aware of who is standing behind you.