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Joshua Oppenheimer Biography

Joshua Oppenheimer

Joshua Lincoln Oppenheimer (born September 23, 1974) is an American-born British film director based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Best known for his Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), Oppenheimer is a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award and a 1997 Marshall Scholar.

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Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

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

Believe, Essentials, Grasp, Past, Unspeakable

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

Finished, Podium, Up To You, Walk, Walks, Want

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.

Cinema, Dominated, Evil, Films, Guy, Nature

I think we create our world through stories. We use storytelling to escape or protect ourselves from the unimaginable and the horrible - from the real, in a way. It's like white light - if you put everyday reality through a prism you get this rainbow of colors that you couldn't see before. I'm interested in exploring the world to show the things that are invisible. And not just undocumented aspects of reality, but to actually make manifest things that have been hitherto invisible through the intervention of filmmaking.

Aspects, Rainbow, Real, Show, Things, Thinking

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

Distance, Reality, Storytelling

People create the illusion of acting natural, which is what I think most documentarians do in part because of the direct cinema orthodoxies that came into play really in the '60s. That moment of performance is a tremendous opportunity to make visible something hitherto invisible, which is how people want to be seen. How do they see themselves? What are the scripts, fantasies, genres by which they imagine themselves? How is storytelling part of what we are as human beings? We wouldn't kill each other en masse if it weren't for storytelling. We wouldn't be able to live with ourselves.

60S, Opportunity, People, Scripts, Thinking

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.

Complete, Drama, Know, Real, World

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 guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.

Bitter, Lying, People, Reality, Saying

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.

Accepting, Happened, Perpetrator, Perpetrators, Usually, Way

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

Documentaries, Documentary, Might, Past, Reenactment, Tradition

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 I also recognize that in turning empathy into a practice for many years, by turning, by forcing myself to separate at some level the humanity of a human being from his or her actions and recognizing that sometimes, even the moral aspects of a human being can contribute to immoral behavior.

Done, Lying, Maybe, Practice, Recognizing, Years

When you approach someone as a human being, truly and try to be as open as safety allows, some of the bigger reenactments with a whole army of paramilitary people participating, I couldn't say my feelings openly in front of everybody, without it being dangerous for my crew.

Army, People, Safety, Whole

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.

Believe, Distance, Honest, Judge, Judging, Person

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

Audience, Spectator, Spectators, Thinking, Towards

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.

Creative, Decision, Free, Instinct, Tell, Wild

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

Country, Indonesia, Killers, Run, Running, Whole

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.

Dictatorship, Dutch, Military, Real, Renaissance, Widely