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

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.

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.

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 see myself as an explorer more than a storyteller.

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.

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

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

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

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

I mean you ACRES of harm, ' Dalrymple growled. 'Untold QUANTITIES of harm. I will visit a whole CONTINENT of harm upon you before we are through.

If we estimate people's responsibility according to the time when they were left exceptionally on their own, then today's generation is a stubborn crowd of hopeless peers.

I have ever found it, when I have thought the battle was over and the conquest gained, and so let down my watch, the enemy has risen up and done me the greatest injury.

The head has the most beautiful appearance, as well as the highest station, in a human figure.

You're nothing short of my everything.

Piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Style is the instrument you can pick back up when you want to regain some of the confidence you've lost.

Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.