Biography

[on The Act of Killing (2012)] 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 about atrocities that should be unimaginable. And the question is: Why are they doing this? For whom are they doing this? What does it mean to them? How do they want to be seen? How do they see themselves? And this method was a way of answering those questions...I think it almost stops being a documentary altogether. It becomes a kind of hallucinatory aria, a kind of fever dream...[that] transcends documentary.

[on the real-life killers in his documentary] Within minutes of meeting me, they would tell me horrible stories, often boastfully, and would say, 'How about if we go to the place where I killed people, and I will show you how I did it?' And then they would often lament afterwards, 'Oh I should have brought a machete along to use as a prop,' or 'I should have brought friends along who could play victims, it would have been more cool that way.'

I think the most important thing for Americans [to understand] is that this genocide is American history. The U.S. helped engineer the whole killing machine and supported the military dictatorship for decades. We have to do exactly the same work that the Indonesians have to do. We have to declassify our documents, acknowledge what we've done and take responsibility for it. [2016]