Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Honestly, it is difficult for me because I cannot return to Indonesia safely. So how am I supposed to make another movie in Indonesia when I cannot safely return to Indonesia?

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.

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

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

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'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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

'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 think, if you're in the United States, we've seen people trying to speak out in different ways and trying to make themselves heard about the United States' failure to move on generationally, given the long-festering wound of our history around race.

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.

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.

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.

At our production company, the trademark dish - and this sounds particularly revolting - is curried pickled herring.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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 have a British and an American passport.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm against escapist entertainment.

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.

I had been working with a community of survivors who had lost their relatives and were too scared to talk about it.

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.

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.

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.

Like all art, nonfiction film should invite, seduce, or force us to confront the most difficult, frightening or mysterious aspects of what it means to be human.

I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The function of journalism is, primarily, to uncover vital new information in the public interest and to put that information in a context so that we can use it to improve the human condition.

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.

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.

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

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.