When playing yourself is playing a part

'It is perhaps telling that in both instances — The Act of Killing and The Man Who Saved the World — a departure from strict fly-on-the-wall methods was necessitated, or went hand on hand, with the task of overcoming the resistance of subjects hardened by repressive regimes: Russian and communist Indonesia. Verite turns out to be a poor tool for penetrating ideology.  “Its like an onion,” says Peter Anthony of trying to unravel the grumpy and frequently drunk Colonel Petrov. “You want to peel off all these layers and get to the middle.” And what did he find? At times reluctant to act out conversations for the cameras, he gradually warmed the process. Indeed, after spending some time with a German experimental theatre troop, who heard of Petrov’s story and took him on tour with them as part of an anti-war theatre piece,  “He came back very different,” says The Man Who Saved The World’s producer Jakob Staberg. “Before he would shoot a scene and complain  ‘I’m not an actor’ when he thought Peter was being too demanding. After he came back from playing theater he would say ‘okay Peter now my character, I would say this…’ and had long discussions about how she should pronounce different words. His late wife used to be a projectionist screening 35 mm films in military base. He loved going to the movies. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he became a part of out film. He got to be the star of his own movie.  The Russian actor playing him as a young man said, ‘his acting is better than mine.’ He had tears in his eyes. ‘He’s amazing.’”' — from my piece about documentary truth for the Financial Times