Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 21, 2015


#13 — The Moral Gaze


Episode Stats

Length

32 minutes

Words per Minute

182.47461

Word Count

5,905

Sentence Count

6

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary

Joshua Oppenheimer is a filmmaker who has made two mesmerizing films about genocide, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. He is a recent recipient of the Macarthur "Geniuses" award, and he has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Director for both of them. In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I speak with Joshua about his films and the events that led to them, and how they shaped the history of genocide in Indonesia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and why there is still no justice for the victims of the Indonesian genocide that took place in the jungles of Sumatra and Java in the 1950s. In order to access full episodes of the making sense podcast, you ll need to become a member of the M.O.P.S. (Mother of Podcasts) Club, where you ll get access to all kinds of excellent short-form content, including the latest episodes of Making Sense, wherever you get your podcasts.Become a patron of the podcast by becoming a patron, and get immediate access to the full-length episodes of The Making Sense Podcast series.Becoming a patron is the best way to access the most cutting-edge, high-quality episodes of this podcast, and access the full archive of all things making sense, including all the newest and old-school making sense podcasts, as well as access to our most popular podcasts, books, videos, and original podcasts. The making sense series is now available on all major podcast directories, including Audible, iTunes, Podcoin, and Podcoin. and the New York Times, and The New York Review of podcasts, and is also available on the internet, so make sure to subscribe to Making Sense! Subscribe to the Making sense Podcast wherever else you re listening to this podcast is available. You won t want to miss it? You ll get a discount code: M.E.R. to get 10% off the final issue of the show, making sense? Subscribe, plus a chance to win a discount on future episodes, and receive an ad-free version of the final episode on the podcast, coming soon! Subscribe and subscribe to the podcasting app, The Making sense plus other perks like this, too you ll have access to exclusive bonus episodes, plus all sorts of goodies, including shoutouts and shoutouts, and so much more! Thank you for supporting the podcast?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
00:00:12.600 this you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part
00:00:17.000 of this conversation in order to access full episodes of the making sense podcast you'll
00:00:21.900 need to subscribe at samharris.org there you'll find our private rss feed to add to your favorite
00:00:27.120 podcatcher along with other subscriber only content we don't run ads on the podcast and
00:00:32.600 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy
00:00:36.620 what we're doing here please consider becoming one today i'll be speaking with joshua oppenheimer
00:00:48.780 a filmmaker who has made two mesmerizing films the act of killing and the look of silence
00:00:55.300 and as you'll hear from this interview i am quite awed by his achievement he has managed to
00:01:02.380 make films about genocide that are harrowing as you would expect but also remarkably beautiful and
00:01:12.780 he's created a kind of moral laser with both of these projects and it just it focuses the relevant
00:01:20.040 emotions of outrage and compassion in a way that that i haven't experienced before in film as i say
00:01:27.360 at the outset of this interview i consider both of these films masterpieces i highly recommend that
00:01:32.960 you see them if you haven't i think you'll be able to enjoy our conversation whether or not you've seen
00:01:37.400 them but this should really be a goad to go straight to a movie theater to see the look of silence
00:01:42.300 and to go online to see the director's cut of the act of killing which you can see on netflix but
00:01:48.460 other than that i hope you enjoy this conversation with joshua oppenheimer he's a recent recipient of
00:01:53.300 the macarthur quote genius award which if you've seen the films you will recognize as richly deserved
00:02:00.900 so without further ado i give you joshua oppenheimer
00:02:04.580 hey joshua how you doing i'm very good thanks for having me thanks for coming on the podcast
00:02:15.160 listen are you um are you sitting down i'm going to praise you rather fulsomely to start
00:02:20.660 i'm sitting i gotta tell you i mean you have made two of the best documentaries i have ever seen i mean
00:02:27.660 i consider both your films the act of killing and the look of silence just masterpieces and i don't use
00:02:33.480 that word lightly so it's it's just it's a great pleasure to talk to you and i i'd like to i know
00:02:38.520 you have the second film the look of silence coming out today in new york i don't know when we're going
00:02:42.920 to release this podcast uh i assume uh it'll be out in in at least los angeles by the time we do
00:02:48.960 but um i just want to tell you you're i want to talk about both films emphasizing the new one but
00:02:55.160 it's an amazing accomplishment what you've done with these films well thank you so much i'm i'm honored
00:03:01.400 and humbled by your by by that thank you now before we get into the the films themselves perhaps
00:03:08.920 you can say a little bit about the relevant history here because both films discuss a genocide that many
00:03:15.660 people don't know anything about and it follows a history of exploitation by western powers that
00:03:21.960 really is quite shocking so can you tell us a little bit about what happened in indonesia
00:03:26.160 sure well indonesia was a dutch colony until 1945 and uh sukarno the first president of indonesia was
00:03:33.920 a charismatic left-leaning populist and the founder of the non-aligned movement he was trying to steer
00:03:40.640 indonesia into a space a course of development that was neither dependent on the soviet union nor the west
00:03:46.740 nor the united states in in the cold war when countries were under tremendous pressure to take sides
00:03:52.280 and to and to align themselves with one power or the other and this of course incurred the wrath of
00:03:58.120 the united states so in the years from the late 50s up until 1965 the united states supported began
00:04:05.680 supporting very intensively the indonesian army as a kind of opponent of the president of sukarno and of
00:04:12.720 the broader indonesian left and in 1965 there was a military coup in which a new military dictatorship came to
00:04:20.100 power and consolidated its rule through the mass murder of anywhere between half a million and three
00:04:26.840 million people in under six months the victims were any presumed opponent of the new regime so union
00:04:34.100 leaders uh progressive politicians critical journalists the ethnic chinese anyone who was uh in a left-leaning
00:04:42.860 organization called the leaders of the indonesian women's movement and all of this was supported and
00:04:48.500 incited and then rewarded to the tune ultimately of billions of dollars of aid by the united states
00:04:55.100 so in indonesia we have essentially two generations of people who have been living surrounded by the
00:05:02.100 people who murdered their loved ones there's been no justice that the killers are still in power
00:05:06.520 that's right more than that's right beyond there having been no justice for the reason there's been
00:05:11.580 no justice is because the perpetrators remain in power and i believe you said in another interview
00:05:16.320 that it was like going to germany 40 years after the holocaust and finding the nazis still in power
00:05:22.360 and happy to reminisce about how they reduced millions of people to ash yeah and i think the nazis would be
00:05:28.480 more ashamed of it than the indonesians because they knew that the rest of the world or was was
00:05:35.640 condemning the holocaust while it was taking place whereas here the indonesians knew uh the perpetrators
00:05:41.540 in indonesia know and believe that the rest of the world uh was celebrating their genocide while it was
00:05:48.640 taking place in fact while i was filming one of the perpetrators one of them looks right at the camera
00:05:52.860 because i'm right behind the camera and therefore right at me and right at the audience and says i should
00:05:57.420 be rewarded with a cruise to the united states because it was america that taught me uh to hate and kill
00:06:03.800 the communists and there's a very um inadvertently funny but just um tonally so now deranged piece of
00:06:14.600 footage that you supply in the new movie the look of silence from i think it was nbc news or or was it
00:06:20.580 nbc news or it was an nbc yeah maybe a special one hour long nbc news report produced in 1967 essentially
00:06:28.600 celebrating the genocide we hear uh that indonesia is now more beautiful without the communists and we hear
00:06:35.540 that goodyear major corporation uh in order to harvest the latex that would end up in our tires the soles of
00:06:44.080 our shoes and in our condoms was using slave labor drawn from death camps when the workers were used up they
00:06:52.320 were sent back to the camps to be killed starved or dispatched out to death squads to be killed this is
00:06:59.960 of course essentially what german corporations were doing on the periphery of auschwitz a mere 20 years
00:07:06.620 earlier and the german radio uh was not actually broadcasting that to to german citizens this is
00:07:13.700 actually being reported pretty openly to american citizens but as something good as good news as as a
00:07:19.780 victory in the struggle for freedom and democracy something that should be uh celebrated something
00:07:25.340 that some and it should give us pause any anyone seeing the film ought to pause and wonder whether
00:07:30.920 the struggle of the so-called free world against the communist world was the real reason
00:07:36.340 for these uh for american involvement in these atrocities or whether that was actually just a pretext or an
00:07:42.440 excuse for the murderous corporate plunder that we see documented in sunny terms in the nbc
00:07:49.780 clip well it is a ghastly history but history aside and the horrific details aside i'd like to get at
00:07:58.180 what is so unusual about your films because there you know there are many documentaries on horrible pieces of
00:08:06.440 history you know many holocaust documentaries and many genocides have been reviewed in film and this
00:08:14.440 makes for difficult viewing in every case but what's so strange about your films is that they're almost
00:08:20.480 like psychological experiments for for the audience and for the people on the screen and i would imagine
00:08:24.800 for you as a filmmaker because you have created situations that no one has really seen before i think
00:08:31.980 few people would have thought possible and they they have the effect of turning up the volume on our
00:08:38.780 moral emotions and the feelings of outrage and and horror at man's inhumanity to man but you've done
00:08:45.700 this in contexts that can't contain these emotions at all it's in in the act of killing your first film
00:08:52.860 there's a a campiness and and near comedy to this movie where the main killer is this amusing dandy who
00:09:00.280 you know who loves elvis and john wayne and he's got this fellow goon sidekick who's a crossdresser and
00:09:06.380 i'll get into each film separately but i'm now talking about both generally in the new film you
00:09:11.920 do something very different but it has the same effect of not being able to contain the emotions
00:09:18.880 you're driving to the surface because in in the new film the look of silence there's a a formal beauty
00:09:24.800 to it and a every all these shots are so stunning and so tranquil and there's there's a silence and and
00:09:33.100 an attention to aesthetic detail in your framing of everything but it's like there are nuclear bombs
00:09:38.260 going off beneath the surface and all we're seeing is the occasional unsettling of a teacup and the
00:09:44.360 effect is just riveting that that's those are beautiful descriptions of what i've tried to do
00:09:49.200 in both films i mean i try to paradoxically by narrowing my focus onto one perpetrator and the
00:09:54.840 men around him in the act of killing and one survivor's family and the look of silence
00:09:58.680 i try to create immersive present tense experiences for viewers i try not to tell a story through
00:10:05.200 exposition which of course keeps us at the distance gives us the same remove from the events depicted
00:10:10.220 that a storyteller that a narrator would have but instead i try to immerse you and have you identify
00:10:16.420 with the people involved and in both i see my work as creating occasions creating situations in which
00:10:24.300 the inherent contradictions and horrors come to the surface in a way that feels overwhelming and
00:10:30.080 despite it all taking place within the overall safe space of making a film uh uncomfortable for
00:10:35.800 everybody involved and in the act of killing you know i'm encountering the truth of boasting bragging
00:10:41.800 uh perpetrators uh and i felt the moral truth of this the kind of uh sort of transcendent truth
00:10:48.940 here would be if these perpetrators would make a musical and so i invite them to dramatize what
00:10:55.040 they've done in whatever ways they wish in order to uh make visible the lies the stories the fantasies
00:11:02.360 that allow them to live with themselves the persona the contradictory persona they inhabit that allow
00:11:07.580 them to live with themselves and then this is something you really see in the uh in the uh longer
00:11:13.780 international version of the film the version of the act of killing that came out outside the united
00:11:17.780 states but is now actually available in the u.s too as the director's cut on netflix it's the act of
00:11:23.440 killing director's cut um but it's 40 minutes longer the what came out outside the united states you see
00:11:29.940 this kind of recursive process of performing of dramatizing and then watching and responding and
00:11:37.280 you see anwar act uh watching his own fantasies his dramatizations and then proposing the next one in
00:11:44.000 response and watching and proposing the next one in response and what unfolds is this kind of fever
00:11:51.720 dream about escapism and guilt and we are sucked right into it with anwar so i think that what what
00:11:58.760 what's happening here is we are immersed and and and and each time anwar watches the horror of
00:12:06.540 watches his previous dramatization we can see that he's terribly pained but as you put it very nicely
00:12:13.040 there's nowhere for those emotions to go except further denial so he launches into he proposes
00:12:19.500 what he considers to be a kind of aesthetic improvement as though if he can fix the scene
00:12:23.560 aesthetically he can somehow dispel the pain and fix his past morally and so one dramatization
00:12:30.220 begets another begets another begets another until we're tobogganing through a kind of fever dream of
00:12:35.380 shifting fantasies and we get this and it's about again the lies and fantasies that make up
00:12:41.040 the the killers present and the terrible consequences of those when imposed on the whole society of
00:12:47.400 the corruption the thuggery and the fear and in the look in that sense it is about impunity
00:12:53.320 today not about the events of the genocide half a century ago which as you pointed out there's many
00:12:59.520 documentaries about terrible things in the past and they they don't have the same impact because we
00:13:04.340 know that there's been many terrible episodes of history all over the world i try to make this
00:13:09.280 about the present and i try to make it universal similarly in the look of silence by focusing
00:13:14.900 on one survivor who sets out to do something unimaginable something that we have never seen
00:13:20.560 in the history of non-fiction film namely confronting survivors confronting perpetrators while they still
00:13:27.780 hold a monopoly on power we see another kind of confrontation when adi goes and shows that he's willing to
00:13:35.140 forgive the men if they can only accept what they've done is wrong they're forced to see him
00:13:41.780 and by his by extension the brother his brother whom they murdered and then all of their victims
00:13:46.600 as humans and their their lies their delusions start to crumble and you see them frantically scrambling
00:13:53.880 for new lies uh because those emotions are impossible as you put it sam and they they uh start to deny
00:14:00.740 they they deny responsibility they get angry they get defensive and all of this takes place within
00:14:07.840 a space that i've tried to depict with as much grace and humanity and even love as possible so that we can
00:14:16.500 feel yeah the haunted silence in which the family has been the survivors families are forced to live and in
00:14:24.940 which this is taking place and i i hope it makes the violence and the anger and the the the tinder sort
00:14:31.940 of tinderbox it's it's the kind of silence of nitroglycerin i hope it makes all that the beauty
00:14:37.340 and the intimacy makes all of that more shocking it certainly does and also the level of compassion
00:14:44.960 evinced in in especially the second film the look of silence is really breathtaking and adi's
00:14:51.360 compassion and his apparent willingness to forgive if he can only find someone with a conscience worth
00:14:57.640 forgiving i mean that seeing his interaction with the the killers of his brother is just mesmerizing
00:15:04.480 and i i want to step back for a second though and because we just kind of breeze through the act of
00:15:09.320 killing and for those who haven't seen the film it'd be very difficult to understand what's going on
00:15:14.240 here in fact i think for even if you've seen it on a first viewing it's very hard to appreciate
00:15:20.360 how strange a document this is you you inevitably miss some of the amazing detail in the beginning as
00:15:28.260 you're trying to figure out you get your bearings in this world and and in with this project that
00:15:33.780 you've created of the musical in which these killers reenact their crimes so i want to just talk
00:15:39.600 just broadly about the two the devices you use in both films in the act of killing as you say you
00:15:44.760 you have the killers create a a musical kind of a weird hybrid westerns you know film noir soap opera
00:15:53.460 in which they depict their torture and murder of their neighbors and crucially also their feelings
00:16:03.000 about it right right you know they've these sort of musical numbers often reflect on their emotions
00:16:08.480 about what they've done their desperate attempt to glorify it for example and they and they play both
00:16:13.360 parts so that you have killers playing victims too and so they're they're experiencing both sides of
00:16:18.660 it you're often in the same they don't even change costume incongruously they play victims in what
00:16:24.080 they were wearing as killers but it becomes this very strange ritual of almost just an expiation of
00:16:31.540 their sins and then you have them watching this footage and this is a device you use in both movies
00:16:37.360 where you have both perpetrators and victims watching the confessions of perpetrators on on television
00:16:45.840 and then you film them while they're watching themselves or others confess to these crimes
00:16:50.340 and so this this film within a film device in in the act of killing is what in my view makes it
00:16:56.980 really one of the strangest documents our species has ever produced i mean half of my
00:17:02.740 amazement at the film was was not so much that the events themselves that you depict are amazing and
00:17:09.080 and and horrible but the the sheer fact that your film exists was as amazing as anything within it i
00:17:16.080 mean how you got these people to collaborate in this way and what they thought they were doing and
00:17:21.100 just it produces this this uncanny feeling of strangeness now in the in the look of silence your new film
00:17:27.280 it's a very different film you're treating the same material you're talking about the same events but you
00:17:31.940 have a different device here where you where adi who's a an optician is fitting he doesn't do this
00:17:38.240 in every interview but in many interviews with with the killers that the interview is conducted over
00:17:43.300 the course of him fitting them for eyeglasses so there he's testing their vision and then he's
00:17:47.920 using that as a context in which to have this conversation was that did you just just stumble into
00:17:54.140 that device or was this did the filmmaker and you realize that this was going to produce
00:17:59.440 wonderful footage and a great way in so that you crafted this as a device or no of course the
00:18:05.740 filmmaker and i recognize that this would be the filmmaker and me recognize that this would be this
00:18:09.700 powerful metaphor for blindness because i knew adi would be testing the eyes of men who would be
00:18:15.500 resistant to seeing so i knew that um and i knew that uh specifically the eye tests would be this
00:18:24.060 they wouldn't give us access i mean i they the film the perpetrators adi's confronting knew me from
00:18:29.380 years earlier so the access would come from me i would bring adi and i would say i'm back after all
00:18:33.840 these years the men who uh and and this time i no longer want you to dramatize what you've done in
00:18:40.500 whatever way you wish which is what i would have maybe asked them to do years earlier i would remind
00:18:45.320 them that i'd gone on to make a film with some of the most powerful men in the country in which they do
00:18:49.540 just that uh so that they and that would of course serve to keep us safe the men the act of killing
00:18:56.120 had been shot but had not yet come out when we had not yet been seen by anybody it'd been edited but
00:19:02.720 had not been seen by anybody when we shot the look of silence i knew once it was seen i wouldn't be able
00:19:07.100 to return safely to indonesia so this was a space where it was a it was a narrow window where we could
00:19:14.260 make this film and i realized that i was well known for being close for having made this film at the
00:19:19.460 highest ranking perpetrators in the country and believed therefore people believed therefore
00:19:23.200 that we were close because that no one had seen the act of killing yet now i'm still close with
00:19:27.800 anwar kongo the main character in the film but of course the powerful politicians in the act of killing
00:19:32.820 hate me so i would tell the men adi was visiting i'm back with this after all these years i've gone on
00:19:39.000 to make a film with some of the most powerful men in the country i would name some names i wouldn't
00:19:44.300 refer to them as most powerful men in the country i would just name their names and then i would say
00:19:47.600 i this time want to film you and adi discussing these events you both have personal relationships
00:19:54.220 to it you may disagree with each other try to listen to one another because of course adi was
00:19:59.840 hoping to find reconciliation with his neighbors and i told him from the beginning i don't think
00:20:05.460 you'll find anybody who's able to admit their guilt because it would be too traumatic for them to do so
00:20:10.400 but if i can show their pained responses if i can show how impossible it is that is to say if i can
00:20:16.900 document why we fail to get the reconciliation you're hoping for i will be making visible
00:20:22.340 how torn the social fabric of indonesia is and how urgently truth reconciliation and some form of
00:20:29.280 justice are needed and in that sense for anyone watching the film anywhere in the world people will
00:20:35.080 be half will be forced to acknowledge the prison of fear in which every indonesian is living today
00:20:40.440 and therefore forced to uh support and somehow to support truth and reconciliation and i said to adi
00:20:49.920 i think that so i i think you will fail but i think that we might succeed in a bigger way through the film
00:20:56.560 as a whole and so like the like the dramatizations in the act of killing i felt that the confrontations
00:21:03.200 in the look of silence would make visible something that had pre and impossible to ignore something
00:21:10.120 that had previously been invisible or deliberately ignored by everybody in indonesia and that so then
00:21:16.760 i would say i'm here so i want to document this i would tell the perpetrators i want to document
00:21:20.840 your conversation with adi try to listen to one another and if you can and as a thank you for your
00:21:26.040 time adi is an optometrist he will test your eyes and if you need glasses and want glasses we'll give
00:21:31.600 you as many pairs of glasses as you like and you see i realized that the eye tests uh in addition to
00:21:37.820 likely producing this kind of powerful metaphor for blind blindness would also help keep the seat the
00:21:43.440 confrontation safe you you referred to them as interviews sam but you're well we're having a
00:21:49.320 conversation more but but such a such a conversation would be could be called an interview you're sort of
00:21:54.080 interviewing me uh for an interview is when you're looking for information and feelings adi's trying to do
00:21:59.420 something he's trying to reconcile his family with his neighbor's family with the families with his
00:22:05.880 brother's killers and that's not an interview that's a confrontation that's a dramatic scene
00:22:11.780 uh and i realized that as a first if we could make wherever possible if the first part of this drama
00:22:17.240 this confrontation where eye tests it would help keep us safe because when you're having your eyes tested
00:22:23.140 you're of course disarmed your guard is down you're not likely to physically attack somebody
00:22:27.960 and also of course it was a it was a context that adi could prolong for as long as necessary
00:22:34.280 where he could uh elicit the stories uh the the most important details of what the perpetrators had done
00:22:41.300 all things that they had told me years earlier uh but but of course if adi were to go to them and say
00:22:47.060 i understand you did this and this and this from joshua's footage they would feel trapped
00:22:50.920 and there would be no chance of dialogue it would be dangerous and confrontational from the outset
00:22:56.900 so this was the chance for the perpetrators in a comfortable setting to volunteer what they had
00:23:02.860 done and in a context that a setting or time frame that adi could control he could keep it going for as
00:23:09.060 long as necessary so that was the original impetus for the eye test but of course i understood
00:23:12.740 this would likely be this very powerful metaphor because i knew the kind of stories they would tell i
00:23:17.880 knew they would tell these unspeakable details things like right out of a hieronymus bosch painting
00:23:22.780 while their eyes are being framed by these ridiculous surreal scarlet test lenses yeah yeah
00:23:30.340 and visually it has an aesthetic beauty too i mean you you open the film if i'm not mistaken with a shot
00:23:35.540 of one of the people getting his his eyes tested so much of this hinges on adi as a person and just how
00:23:42.440 he shows up for these confrontations and he is truly remarkable i mean he he is there's a level of
00:23:48.900 moral seriousness and gradations of anguish and compassion that you get off of him it's i mean he's
00:23:56.760 like a one-man truth and reconciliation commission there's a moral force to his very subtle conversations
00:24:03.660 with these people once you're witnessing it you realize you just you haven't seen these kinds of
00:24:10.100 encounters between people really ever yeah and it's it's um it's it's quite amazing i watching the
00:24:18.020 film though i began to worry for his safety and it seems like he was running a considerable risk
00:24:24.240 collaborating with you and this this comes out you know his concern about this comes out at various
00:24:29.060 points in the film and i believe in your press materials you talk about this being you mentioned
00:24:34.720 it here that it's the first time that this has ever happened where you have someone confronting
00:24:39.460 perpetrators of a genocide when the when the perpetrators are still in power and so i'm just
00:24:45.360 wondering what kind of safety precautions did you take and what is his security situation now well
00:24:51.000 we took we knew that we might have to stop the filming and not even and perhaps not even release
00:24:56.300 the film throughout the production uh we for each of the confrontations adi would go with no id so that
00:25:02.860 it would be if we were detained it would be hard for adi to be uh for adi for them to identify who he
00:25:08.900 was before we could get help hopefully from one of our embassies uh adi would bring we would have
00:25:14.720 come with two cars so that we would be able to we if we had to run away or escape it would be harder
00:25:20.700 for them to follow us so we had a kind of getaway vehicle and we uh adi would adi would have his family
00:25:26.520 waiting at the airport ready to evacuate if anything went wrong for all of the confrontations with the
00:25:32.140 more powerful perpetrators these were safety precautions that we took but then when the film
00:25:39.220 was i think the what kept us safe above all was as i said earlier first of all that the cover that we
00:25:45.820 had from the fact that i was believed to be close to the highest ranking perpetrators of course word
00:25:50.580 could have spread to them somebody could have asked do you realize what josh was doing and that could
00:25:55.220 have fallen apart so every night between the confrontations i would spend with anwar congo
00:25:59.760 which was sort of strange to be shifting between adi by day and anwar by night but we knew that if
00:26:06.440 word had spread anwar would be the first to find out just for our listeners anwar is the perpetrator
00:26:11.680 protagonist from your first film the act of the act of killing and we and of course uh that's right
00:26:17.460 and so we knew that he would tell me or i would feel that something was amiss if word had spread that
00:26:22.560 was what would allow us to make the decision with some comfort to shoot the next day we shot the scenes as
00:26:27.560 quickly as possible over the course of their six confrontations we shot them over six days
00:26:32.620 as we worked and we worked our way up the chain of command we shot one test confrontation in fact
00:26:37.620 it's the one with enum the man with the uh red glasses that we talked about earlier because we knew
00:26:43.400 he had a terrible relationship with his commanders had no one therefore to complain to really and adi does
00:26:49.120 not tell him you remember you may remember this from the film sam adi does not tell him who he is
00:26:54.060 and we used that so that adi could then go to his wife and to his mother and his family and say what
00:26:58.760 he's doing we could film their reactions which you see in the film as well and you see their apprehension
00:27:03.360 and then we showed them that scene so they could see what it looks like the family then said this is
00:27:09.080 very important if there's some way of continuing this even if it means we have to move you should
00:27:14.300 try to continue because you're breaking half a century of silence here i think the other thing that
00:27:19.340 kept us safe was the fact that the these men simply could not believe these conversations were
00:27:24.660 happening at all there's this sense of total disbelief they just can't believe the questions
00:27:30.440 that are coming out of adi's mouth and they don't know how to respond that mean in a way being able to
00:27:36.600 intimidate or bully or terrorize someone depends on them being afraid there was this kind of
00:27:45.460 amazing study of a woman in somewhere in the midwest whose fear center in her brain wasn't
00:27:51.560 working and people would come up to her to mug her and she would react with no fear and uh they
00:27:57.300 would they would run away because they were frightened by her lack of fear and i think there's
00:28:02.540 some of that going on in any case when we had a rough cut of the film about six months before the
00:28:07.920 world premiere at the venice film festival we met all of us the film crew the team that released had
00:28:13.160 already released the act of killing in indonesia adi's family and me and my producer in thailand
00:28:18.760 at that point thailand because we knew i couldn't safely return to indonesia anymore ever since the
00:28:23.600 act of killing was released and we asked what should we do should we hold this film back until these men
00:28:29.040 are so old they pose us no threat or until there's been real political change in indonesia or should we
00:28:34.220 release the film and the family move to europe well when the family and the indonesian team saw the film
00:28:39.420 they said this has to come out right away there's so much momentum for change from the first film
00:28:44.880 the act of killing that we need to build on that and the family said well we're willing to move to
00:28:49.540 europe if that's what it takes crew in indonesia said let us see if there's a way we can keep you
00:28:54.480 in indonesia if you would prefer that uh if you feel comfortable with that because we think that adi
00:28:59.160 will be seen as a national hero when this film comes out we'll have a central role to play
00:29:03.400 in the movement for truth and reconciliation in fact we were able to do that the family did have to
00:29:08.780 move several thousand kilometers from where uh we shot the film from where the family comes from
00:29:13.780 they're now out from under the shadow of perpetrators but still in indonesia there's of course nationally
00:29:20.000 powerful perpetrators who we also worry about they have not threatened adi uh there's the family still
00:29:25.600 in indonesia uh the children are in better schools we see the terrible uh brainwashing that happens in
00:29:32.360 indonesian schools in the film the children are in better schools adi uh has we've raised money
00:29:38.760 for adi with the true false film festival to uh for adi to open an optometry store a brick and
00:29:45.480 mortar eyeglasses shop and for the kids to be able to go to university should they wish to so there's a
00:29:51.540 better future that we're trying to build for the family but the fact that they and the fact that the
00:29:56.780 family should have to flee like fugitives when they're simply trying to create uh trying in fact to
00:30:05.020 forgive their neighbors is a sign of how far indonesia still has to go before it becomes truly
00:30:11.160 a democracy with the rule of law where the law applies equally to the most powerful as it does
00:30:16.480 to the weakest and that said adi is now seen by many in indonesia as a national hero and is playing a very
00:30:23.340 central role in the movement for truth and reconciliation there so it it's there is but yet and yet we do have a
00:30:29.340 plan b for the family to leave the country should it at any point become necessary oh good well i'm
00:30:34.640 happy to hear both of those facts but i guess i'm a little surprised or confused about the basis for
00:30:43.040 surprise among the indonesian higher ups you know all the perpetrators knew what they were divulging in
00:30:50.020 their encounters with you and in both films and there's evidence certainly in the act of killing that
00:30:55.820 this history of genocide is openly celebrated there's one scene where you have a uh you have
00:31:01.920 them on what looks like a local talk show maybe it's a national talk show and there's a young woman
00:31:07.700 interviewing anwar kongo and and the others about their murder of of communists and they even claim
00:31:14.560 that they killed 2.5 million communists kind of the high end of the spectrum i think it's more often
00:31:20.060 said that a million people died so they're celebrating this on television and there's lots of laughter and
00:31:25.040 there's just there's absolutely no moral qualm about what happened so then what is if that is in fact
00:31:32.200 what the national dialogue is around the disappearance of over a million people and all these people knew
00:31:38.680 what they were telling you and they were bragging about having participated in this what is then the
00:31:44.060 basis for outrage once your films come out i think there's there's an official history which doesn't
00:31:51.160 refer to the genocide but talks about the heroic extermination
00:31:55.100 if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org
00:32:01.780 once you do you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the making sense podcast
00:32:06.080 along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and amas and the conversations i've
00:32:12.500 been having on the waking up app the making sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener
00:32:18.040 support and you can subscribe now at samharris.org