I can see something true through the camera that is not immediately visible. If I start from you and your expectation as a participant of what cinema should be, you will start staging yourself, you’ll start acting out an idealized image of yourself, you’ll start acting out the fantasies that you hold of yourself. And I’ll be able to know how you dream of yourself, how you imagine the world. And that’s also how I tried to use the camera, especially in The Act of Killing. And I think that’s the state of nature for the non-fiction camera. If I put a camera on anybody, they start to perform. And from that performance we can see how people want to be seen. And we can infer how they really see themselves. In short, we can see the role of fiction storytelling and fantasy in constituting our apparently factual reality.

- Joshua Oppenheimer, interviewed by Dana Knight for The Independent

"Anyone who agrees to be interviewed must decide where to draw the line between what is public and what is private," Gross says. "But the line can shift, depending on who is asking the questions. What puts someone on guard isn't necessarily the fear of being 'found out.' It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood."
http://www.npr.org/people/2100593/terry-gross

Mary Jo: A first cut is never a first cut. It's usually my fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth cut by the time I'm ready to show it to J.J.. It's one reason why I absolutely detest the term 'editor's assembly'. We are taking a point of view, and cutting something with intent. We are not 'assembling' anything.
[...]
Creative COW: Out of curiosity, were either of you Star Wars fans in a major way before this?

Maryann: I was a big Star Wars fan.
[...]
Mary Jo: I was not a fan. I mean, it's not that I was anti-Star Wars, I just wasn't particularly into the films and I didn't see them until it turned out that I was going to be working on them.
[...]
I also think there was an actual advantage to that. I didn't have this feeling of things being sacred. I could just look at it, maybe at times a little more dispassionately. "Well even if it is true that you're making this reference to this thing that you all hold near and dear, it's not really working here," or whatever. 

And I think J.J. felt that too. In fact, when I first told him that I hadn't seen the Star Wars movies, he said he didn't want me to see them. That was his first response. "Oh that's great! Don't see them! You'll be be like the person we want to attract who's never seen the movies."

[...]
Mary Jo: We started with the dialog between the characters, and their actions. We might have something to slot in if there was a previz done for the scene, but most of the time, we didn't have that. The fact that we start with the actions of characters creates a personal way into the action of the scene. 

Maryann: Any action sequence is better if you're in it WITH the character.​

​https://library.creativecow.net/wilson_tim/Editing_Star-Wars-The-Force-Awakens/1

... to me these are really, really, really important issues. 
[...]
... the claim that everybody sees the world differently, is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim. What really surprised me on re-watching Rashomon is that you know what really happened at the end. It's pretty damn clear. Kurosawa gives you the pieces of evidence that allow you to figure out what really happened. So, it's not what many people imagine it to be, but it is a very powerful story about self-interest, about wishful thinking, about self-deception, about people imagining scenarios at variance with the truth. And so I found Rashomon to be far more interesting than I had remembered it. With an underlying theme very much like The Thin Blue Line. Truth exists, but people have a vested interest in not knowing it.
[...]
I was surprised at the time that The Thin Blue Line came out that people reacted to the reenactments as blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. Between documentary and drama. My feeling was the exact opposite. It was telling us how images can confuse us. Images are not reality, nor do I claim that they are. In fact, they usually bear a very complicated relationship to reality. And when people talk about reenactments, I like to point out that consciousness, itself, is a reenactment. Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray-matter of the brain. Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real. Take the first line in Vernon, Florida: "Reality. You mean, this is the real world. I never thought of that."
http://errolmorris.com/content/interview/believer0404.html