Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

I came across the Indonesian genocide in 2001, when I found myself making a film in a community of survivors. They were plantation workers, and it turned out they were struggling to organize a union.

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll.

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 still receive very regular death threats that make it impossible for me to return to Indonesia. I think I could get in, but I don't think I could get out again.

You see, 'The Look of Silence' is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It's normally never done because it is too dangerous.

I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.

Denial, panic, threats, anger - those are very human responses to feeling guilt.

I didn't really get any rigorous background in film history.

For my part, as a filmmaker, I've never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it's a lie.

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

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

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

The filmmakers have a story they want to tell, and they go get the material they need for it. The film either exceeds or fails to meet up to their expectations or it's different.

I am always a little surprised when anyone sees anything I make, so being nominated for the Oscar is beyond amazing - what a tremendous honor.

My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.

I think that indignation is pleasurable, and it's pleasurable because it's self-righteous.

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.

All we can do is find the courage to stand still and to look backwards.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

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.

If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.

In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.

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.

Waking from any fever dream, one retains, above all, impressions seared into memory.

What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.

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

We have to support truth and reconciliation and some form of justice.

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

I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'

For me, I'm a filmmaker because, above all, I'm an explorer. It's my way of exploring and investigating the problems, the questions, and the mysteries about what it means to be human that vex me most, that keep me up at night, and that, when I finally fall asleep, insinuate themselves into my dreams.

We all identify with the people we see, and in a good documentary, we are not just reading an account of the world, we're seeing and hearing our world.

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

I think 'The Act of Killing' forced people to look at the problem, but the problem is actually a state run by thugs, or a shadow state, a part of the state that's run by thugs, and a military that enjoys complete legal - not just impunity, but immunity.

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

I have a British and an American passport.

There are committed Indonesian filmmakers who are committed supporters of 'The Act Of Killing.'

I don't really want to leave anything in life behind. We have bad experiences, we have difficult experiences, but if you leave everything behind, you have no past.

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.

We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it's what makes us we are. It's what delineates the borders of our societies.

You cry the first tear because something is genuinely, singularly upsetting. And you cry the second tear because everybody is crying that first tear with you, and you know that.

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.

Indonesia can hold regular elections, but if the laws do not apply to the most powerful elements in society, then there is no rule of law and no genuine democracy. The country will never become a true democracy until it takes serious steps to end impunity.

From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting 'The Act of Killing' and then editing it.

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.

In Denmark, the annual Christmas party is probably the most important cultural institution in the country.

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

I'm sure it's one of the most frustrating aspects of human experience for all of us, that when we tell someone who's hurt us that they've hurt us, they tend to react with anger because they feel guilty, and we know we also get angry when we feel guilty.

My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.

I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general.

People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.

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.

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.

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.

Performance is always oriented towards a spectator, towards an imagined audience and I was thinking who is their imagined audience?

Cinema is, of course, the great storytelling medium of modernity.

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

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.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller. A great storyteller, in control of her craft, must be the same person when she finishes telling a story as she was at the start. But I want to be transformed by my filmmaking, by the journey I take.

I think it's our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting about atrocities that should be unimaginable.

'The Act of Killing' helped catalyze this basic transformation in how the media talks about the past.