We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

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?

The mind knows the truth when your heart denies what it feels. When you don't feel safe to let people in it is because you're not ready to deal with the pain of honesty.

Pretending is one of our greatest pleasures. But you have to know you're pretending.

The first time I called myself a 'Witch' was the most magical moment of my life.

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .

Not everyone is nice and good to work with or grateful for the experience.

Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.

I defy anyone - and I have said this to the Germans - to build a solid, articulated, and viable Europe without France's consent.

She shows us only surfaces, but she is million-fathoms deep.

I never feel more at home than at a ballgame.