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.

I see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

We can distance ourselves from the reality of what we did through storytelling.

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

In a fiction film, we know at some level we've suspended disbelief. In a documentary, we know that we're watching a drama unfold in the world because of the movie we're watching that is real. That has enormous stakes for the whole society, and we, by the act of watching, complete the story.

Direct cinema is about simulating a reality in which you're not having the overwhelming influence that you really are having.

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

I need to trust myself and go where my instincts tell me, and to be as wild and free as possible in my creative decisions.

I don't believe you can make an honest film about another person in all their complexities from a place of distance. You can make a journalistic report, you can judge someone from a distance, but you can't really get to know them.

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

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.

I've become more forgiving, even though I have no patience at all for denial, justification of wrong, rationalization. I've become virtually a pacifist, so I feel that no atrocity is ever justified. I've become more vigilant about evil. I think I recognize its seeds more quickly. I see its source.