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.
— Joshua Oppenheimer
I'm against escapist entertainment.
My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.
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 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.
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 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 went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.
At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.
I heard about the Holocaust before hearing the 'Cinderella' story or watching 'Peter Pan.'
I don't drink in the cinema because I have a bladder the size of a hummingbird.
My first memory of cinema is my mother taking me to see 'Silkwood,' which is about a whistleblower at a nuclear power plant.
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.
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.
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.
From 2005 to 2010, I was exclusively shooting 'The Act of Killing' and then editing it.
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.
Yes, it was difficult - making 'The Act of Killing' in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity.
I didn't really get any rigorous background in film history.
I don't like to eat when I watch films because it distracts me. Anything crunchy or in a wrapper is terrible.
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 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.
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.
No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there.
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.
I'm a big admirer of S21, and I really also like Rithy Panh's work in general.
'The Look of Silence' is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It's distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council.
I have a British and an American passport.
