Joshua Oppenheimer quotes:

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.

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.

The killers have built the society. The whole Indonesia is their platform. They run the country. They run the country.

In Indonesian, the word isn't translating as "gangster." It's "preman", which comes from the Dutch "préman", which of course the thing that's "freeman" in English.

When you approach someone as a human being, truly and try to be as open as safety allows, some of the bigger reenactments with a whole army of paramilitary people participating, I couldn't say my feelings openly in front of everybody, without it being dangerous for my crew.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

I'm trying to understand how do we tell lies to ourselves to justify what we've done and what are the consequences of those lies? But actually maybe I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior.

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

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

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

A podium is something you walk up to, you say what you want to say and when you're finished, you leave.

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

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.