-[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
ERROL MORRIS: I think there's some inherent
madness in this approach.
Here we have Josh tracking these people down and asking
them to participate in a movie--
not a movie where you chronicle
this historical event.
You ask them to participate in a quote, unquote, "fiction"
film based on real events where they
reenact these murders--
these murders that they committed.
They happily agree to do so, with the emphasis on happily.
WERNER HERZOG: I came across "The Act of Killing" through
some sort of organized coincidences.
I was in London, and a producer with whom I had
worked a lot, Andre Singer, told me that he was an
executive producer of the film "Act of Killing," and the
young man who made the film, Joshua Oppenheimer,
desperately wanted to meet me, only if it
were only for 10 minutes.
And I said, well, it was late in the evening.
Tomorrow morning, maybe, for a moment during breakfast,
because I had to take a plane.
So there was Joshua Oppenheimer.
He didn't say much.
He opened his laptop and showed me eight minutes
excerpts from his film.
And I looked at it, and I immediately knew I had never
seen anything like that.
I'd never seen anything as powerful, as frightening, and
as surreal as what was on the screen.
And I immediately said, this is big.
This is truly, truly big.
ERROL MORRIS: To call it surreal I don't think really
does it justice.
At its heart, it's outrageous, which is one of the things
that makes it really, really, really interesting.
WERNER HERZOG: Surrealism is something
phenomenal in the film.
It has never worked in film history, including Bunuel,
because it's a superimposed sort of artistic
ideology upon film.
And film and surrealism have never
really worked well together.
But in Joshua's film, it works.
You won't see a film of that power and of that surrealism
in the next one or two or three decades, periods.
-[SINGING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
ERROL MORRIS: Movies should have mysteries, and this has
many mysteries.
Why are people repeating their crimes in front of a camera?
To what end?
And what does that have to tell us about
them and about us?
Was it all a performance?
Is it all a sham?
Is it all about the lies that we tell ourselves in order to
keep going day by day?
Where is the guilt and shame here?
I'm not sure I know.
What would we like to be inside us as people versus
what really is inside of us?
Go on and on and on and on as a strange hall of mirrors.
What Josh has done is he's kept it in a strange limbo
land between fantasy and reality.
-[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
WERNER HERZOG: In a way, sometimes, I do believe the
borderline between documentary and fiction is sometimes
blurred in Joshua's Oppenheimer's film as well.
The amount of stylization, the amount of surrealism, the
amount of force of very, very strong hand of a movie
director is in it.
-[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
WERNER HERZOG: I believe that documentary filmmaking--
and I'm one of the great advocates--
has to move away from the pure, fact-based movies,
because facts, per se, do not constitute truth.
That's a big, big, big mistake.
Otherwise, the Manhattan phone directory would
be the book of books--
four million entries, every single one factually correct.
Mr. Jonathan Smith--
his address and telephone number
can be verified correct.
But whether he has nightmares or whether he cries into his
pillow each night, we do not know.
And that's where filmmaking has to move.
ERROL MORRIS: I got into an argument with one critic about
"The Act of Killing" who said that he knew even less about
the genocide in Indonesia after seeing the movie than he
did before.
And I tried to tell him that whatever documentary is, it's
not adult education.
Presumably, it's an art form where we are trying to
communicate something about the real world.
There's a journalistic component, but it's properly
considered, to me, journalism plus something more than
journalism.
You're entering into the idea of something, exploring the
idea of something.
In this particular instance, what if you commit a terrible
crime but you're rewarded for it?
What if 40 years pass, and the memories of what you did still
stay with you?
They're resident in memory.
What effect does it have on you, if any?
Can you commit a terrible crime and pay no penalty?
I'm not just simply talking about criminal penalties or
legal penalties.
I'm talking about psychological penalties.
What, ultimately, is the effect that it has on your
life, on who you are and how you see yourself, which is
really at the heart of this movie, which
makes it, to me, great.
It makes it really compelling.
-[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
WERNER HERZOG: There have been first screenings of the film
at festivals, and I think in some theaters, as well.
And what I have seen is that much of the attention focus is
on the historical facts, on the historical
monstrosity of a crime.
But we should not push the film into the corner of a film
of political agitation.
It could be completely and utterly wrong.
And it wouldn't do the film justice.
The film has such an enormous scope and caliber that it
would really do damage if we only saw the
political issue in it.
And it's much, much, much more.
The way of storytelling, silence as
music, movie making--
it's great, great movie making.
-[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
WERNER HERZOG: I was very much in favor to keep the end in
its complexity and its full length intact, because there
were attempts to cut it down to make it shorter, to be a
little bit more timid than the rest of the film.
And I encouraged Joshua very, very strongly--
keep the end as it is.
Keep it in full length.
That's something nobody's ever, ever seen in a movie.
We won't see that again in the next 50 years.
ERROL MORRIS: To me, the last scene in it is one of the most
powerful things I've ever seen.
And I'm left with this strange question.
It's a really deep question for me.
Is it performance or is it real?
And what does it actually mean about him or about us and
about our own connection with the past?
It's very powerful.
And it's powerful because, I think, it is so inherently
ambiguous and strange.
It's a what the fuck is this moment.
What is actually going on here?
And I can't say that I know.
I can't tell you that it's real or it isn't real, it's
fabricated or it isn't fabricated, it's play acting
or it isn't play acting.
I don't know.
And I think for that reason, it becomes an amazing moment.
Josh maybe is far more optimistic than I am.
-How so?
ERROL MORRIS: I think in the sense that maybe he feels we
do learn something from experience--
that we emerge from all of this somehow more
knowledgeable, more self aware.
I take a slightly different view.
I think we learn nothing.
-[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
ERROL MORRIS: Most movies try to kill thinking.
They take thought and stick a knife in its back.
This is a movie that encourages people to think.
WERNER HERZOG: As long as this film is alive, and it's going
to be out there decades from now on.
And I won't be around anymore, and the film still is going to
be as a beacon of hope in the entire landscape of
documentary filmmaking.
It's a big one.
And it's going to stay for a long, long time.