We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good gu…

- Joshua Oppenheimer

I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the rea…

- Joshua Oppenheimer

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 …

- Joshua Oppenheimer

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

- Joshua Oppenheimer

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

- Joshua Oppenheimer

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 …

- Joshua Oppenheimer

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.

- Joshua Oppenheimer

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…

- Joshua Oppenheimer

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 …

- Joshua Oppenheimer