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.

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.

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?

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

Progress is a natural result of staying focused on the process of doing anything.

For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.

Life is mental

There is no development of character without resistance, there is no growth of spirituality without overcoming.

In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he's standing up, a fakir is just like an other man, and sitting down, he'll be smaller than the others.

As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.

The man form is higher than the angel form; of all forms it is the highest. Man is the highest being in creation, because he aspires to freedom.

I wasn't taken to anywhere I would have gone if I was alone.

I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an incredibly powerful way to tell uplifitng stories that can move people to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars.

Chanel all the way! Just because not only do they have timeless pieces, but since it is the epitome of class and elegance.