Joshua Oppenheimer

If you film a little boy going to school, the big event in that boy's day and all the classmates' and teachers' day is you being there filming, not the school.

Testimony always comes from people who are in some way disempowered.

I think we are fascinated and scared by evil at the same time. I think it's important not to suppress our fascination but to walk into it with open eyes.

Millions of Indonesians who live with secrets in their family who have a sense of that kind of secret that their parents never told them, want to be told about what happened so they can know where they come from.

I think that our task as filmmakers is to create the most insightful reality given the most pressing questions.

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.

I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

In calling someone a bad guy, I reassure myself that I'm good. I elevate myself. I call it the 'Star Wars morality'. And unfortunately, it underpins most of the stories we tell.

I don't drink in the cinema because I have a bladder the size of a hummingbird.

I don't like to eat when I watch films because it distracts me. Anything crunchy or in a wrapper is terrible.

My first memory of cinema is my mother taking me to see 'Silkwood,' which is about a whistleblower at a nuclear power plant.

What I've always been most interested in is exposing the way stories and fantasies reconstitute our everyday reality. What appears to be non-fiction is not only totally mysterious, unfathomable, and strange when you really look at what it is.

Films can't change the society; they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism.

I wanted to resist in 'The Look of Silence' making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors.

To put it crudely, 'The Act of Killing' would blast open the space for the more delicate film, 'The Look of Silence,' to do its work.

I first went to Indonesia in 2001 for six months. I was to help a community of plantation workers to make a film documenting and dramatizing the struggle to organize a union in the aftermath of the Suharto dictatorship.

Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves.

No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there.

In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.

I don't think there's a morally perfect way to do anything in life, but I'm not a filmmaker who tries to hide my mess.