Joshua Oppenheimer

“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 drink in the cinema because I have a bladder the size of a hummingbird.”

“I think it's our obligation as filmmakers, as people investigating the world, to create the reality that is most insightful to the issues at hand. Here are human beings, like us, boasting ab...”

“I'm against escapist entertainment.”

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

“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.”

“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 ou...”

“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 possibili...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 individual...”

“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 t...”

“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 ma...”

“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...”

“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 conditio...”

“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, unfathoma...”

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