JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

For a long time, the Indonesian government ignored 'The Act of Killing,' hoping it would go away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Although we can talk about an Indonesian democracy, or we can talk about democratic elections and democratic rituals - the trappings of democracy - we can't genuinely talk about democracy in Indonesia because there is not rule of law, and democracy without rule of law is a nonsense.

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.

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.