“I think truth is an illusion,” says Monkey on a Stick director Jason Lapeyre. “Documentary purports to be truthful in a way that is as deceptive as dramatic filmmaking is, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Truth is slippery and elusive. And Krishna consciousness in and of itself is a system of belief that fundamentally questions reality.”
Lapeyre gets philosophical quickly while discussing his documentary Monkey on a Stick: Murder, Madness, and the Hare Krishnas. (The title refers to monkeys that were killed at temples after stealing bananas and displayed as warnings for other monkeys.) The film adapts the book of the same name by John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson while exploring systemic corruption and criminal activity within the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).
Monkey on a Stick playfully weaves between elements of conventional documentary, dramatic re-enactment, and creative license, including a finale that uses the form to interrogate the movement in a way that is fictional by design, yet experientially true to one of the film’s participants. (We won’t spoil it for audiences.) The creative stroke underscores how the beliefs of the Hare Krishna faithful—known in popular culture for their signature dress, chanting, and asceticism—aren’t under the microscope here. The actions of faulty leaders are.
Lapeyre, speaking with POV ahead of the release of Monkey on a Stick, says the documentary arose through a circuitous process while pursuing a dramatic true crime series. Lapeyre notes that he optioned the book to develop it as a series with Sphere Films, but shifted gears to their non-fiction unit after making another documentary, the forthcoming Texas Cheerleader Murder Plot, which revived his bug for non-fiction after his 2012 first feature Faceless.
“I worked out these ideas that I applied in Monkey on a Stick where I could take my background as a dramatic filmmaker and use them to create a documentary,” he says of his experience with Texas Cheerleaders. Before returning to docs, Lapeyre’s dramatic work included the 2012 breakthrough thriller I Declare War and the 2016 true crime film Who Killed JonBenét?, both of which find echoes in Monkey on a Stick with the stories of violence against children that ripple throughout ISKCON and the belief systems that have tragic consequences. Lapeyre adds that his interest in documentary also comes from his work as a journalist, having written for the horror magazine Rue Morgue and covering the music beat for Wax Poetics.
“I had a background in interviewing people and conducting oral histories. I did an oral history of the hip-hop group Public Enemy at one point for Wax Poetics and that felt a lot like making a documentary,” says Lapeyre. “It’s just conducting long interviews and then shaping it into a narrative, combining my dramatic background with this journalism experience into something that I actually hoped was documentary but not quite documentary.”

Monkey on a Stick offers an oral history of sorts on the rise and challenges of the Hare Krishna movement. Author John Hubner and a chorus of former Hare Krishna faithful share what attracted them to the spiritual practice popularized in America by Swami Prabhupada during the counter-cultural movement of the mid-1960s. But the interviewees tell how ISKCON, which Prabhupada incorporated in 1966, quickly proved a hotbed of contradictions, complacency, corruption, and criminality. Monkey on a Stick builds upon these perspectives to create a cautionary tale about men who abuse their power in the name of faith.
The film features numerous dramatic sequences of the Errol Morris variety that are less “re-enactments” and more creative visualizations about what transpired during ISKCON’s decline. There are gruesome murders, dismemberment, musical interludes, and an LSD trip. Capping it off is the self-reflexive finale that Lapeyre hopes will inspire conversations. “It’s a bit of magical realism that kind of breaks journalistic ethics per se,” he notes. “I don’t really feel a fidelity to documentary that maybe other documentary filmmakers do. I’m just interested in trying to find some middle ground that hopefully is different and original.”
Lapeyre says his inspiration for the creative departure came from a desire to “come up with something that evoked the Krishna belief in cyclical existence, second chances, returning to previous experiences, and trying to convey something of that character’s crushing guilt and, in my opinion, undeserved guilt.”

That character is former Hare Krishna devotee Nori Muster. She proves a key interviewee in Monkey on a Stick as she recalls finding solace and community through the Hare Krishna movement. She’s not seeking atonement—there’s even a moment in which one can hear Lapeyre offscreen say he’s trying to let her let herself off the hook. Muster resists and provides an insider’s account of the aggressive PR spin entailed within the organization as it battled fractious leaders in effort to dissociate the movement from bad eggs. Her story illustrates the disenchantment that followers faced amid corruption, abuse, and misogyny in the ranks.
Although Muster has her own account of her experience with ISKCON and the Hare Krishnas in her book Betrayal of the Spirit, Lapeyre says he was introduced to her through Hubner. Ultimately, he says he found Muster’s story so compelling, and her willingness to participate so productive, that her voice became a through line of Monkey on a Stick. “I tend to latch on to one of the subjects and really invite them to have an authorial voice in what I’m making, to the point of, frankly, giving them editorial power, not certainly not final cut or final editorial power,” says Lapeyre. “In Faceless, Texas Cheerleaders, and Monkey on a Stick, I was working with one of the subjects of the film and essentially showing them cuts and saying, ‘I want you to tell me if I’m misrepresenting you or not.’”

Lapeyre says it’s a respectful and productive way to make people essentially co-authors while sharing stories about past traumas. “Nori is just such a remarkable human being who had been literally at the center of everything that happened,” adds Lapeyre. “She spoke with such authority and held the truth of what happened in a much more powerful way than anyone else.”
The director notes that Muster gave feedback on several cuts of the film, but in cases where creative opinions differed, they followed his path. Moreover, beyond playing fact-checker and consultant, Lapeyre says that Muster helped him stay on track between her story and that of Monkey on a Stick.
“To her credit, there were points where she was like, ‘Now you’re doing my book, not Monkey on a Stick,’ and I would say, ‘You’re right,’” says Lapeyre, who adds that Muster appears only once or twice in Monkey on a Stick. “But, for example, the sequence in the film where she interviews one of the gurus to try to expose how off the deep end he’s gone, that’s drawn from her book, not Monkey on a Stick.” The sequence features audio archival recordings of Muster’s investigative work into ISKCON leadership with hopes to correct the mismanagement.

This collaborative approach, moreover, adds contemporary resonance to the story, particularly as Muster reflects upon the misogyny within ISKCON. Among the examples is Prabhupada’s philosophy that women are intellectually inferior and have smaller brains. This mindset perpetuates a pervasive sexism that brings the downfall of at least one guru entrusted with leading a “zone” following Prabhupada’s death. The doc even features Muster in conversation with one of the women who endured the guru’s grooming, which Lapeyre cites as an example for her role as a co-author of the film. (Muster gets an associate producer credit.)
“The treatment of women is one of the core problems that happened in that movement. To hear Nori say firsthand, from a feminist perspective, ‘I witnessed fundamental power dynamics that led to almost every problem that happened,’ that informed the way the movie was made,” observes Lapeyre.
The story of Robert Grant, aka Ramesvara, the aforementioned guru who was “handsy” with young women in the Los Angeles temple, begins the first of four chapters that unfold the downslide of ISKCON through the behaviours of problematic men of dubious leadership qualification. Other chapters consider London-based guru James Immel, aka Jayatirtha, who institutionalised the mass consumption of acid within the movement. Members of the faithful would trip, confusing the ecstasy of LSD with the euphoric experience of OM chanting.

Back in California, Monkey on a Stick tells of guru Hans Kary, aka Hansadutta, a paranoid gun-nut with apocalyptic paranoia and violent tendencies. Then there’s the Big Kahuna of corrupt gurus, Keith Ham, aka Kirtanananda, who built a gaudy temple/tourist destination that proved a “dumping ground” for troubled people looking to hide. He also draws comparisons to Tony Soprano with a rap sheet that includes mass copyright infringement, pedophilia, and sanctioning a murder on one of his congregants. The stories come together to indict a litany of institutional failures.
One can easily see echoes of contemporary leaders outside of ISKCON within the portrait of corrosive power. Bring up the name Trump, for example, and Lapeyre notes that one doesn’t even have to utter the word to see the parallels. “He’s just an awful, awful symptom of something that’s happening all over the world and has always happened and will always happen,” he says. “The film is not about religion, in my opinion, it’s about human nature. It’s a plea for people to think critically about their leaders.”
Lapeyre notes that this structure around flawed leaders for Monkey on a Stick came together late in the edit. He says the arc originally followed the book’s chronological narrative, but shifted gears following screeners’ feedback. “The difference between a visual medium and a literary medium is that when you are looking at four gurus who are all white men in their thirties with shaved heads and glasses, the feedback we got back from all of our readers was, ‘I can’t track these guys,’” explains Lapeyre. “I was getting notes where the person was like, ‘Is that the LSD guy or the guns guy?’ And all of the gurus adopted Indian names that are unfamiliar to Western ears.” He credits filmmaker Gary Lang for offering advice to ensure he kept the audience hooked and to film editor Ashley Gilmore, who restructured the film five days before locking it.

Amid the restructuring, Monkey on a Stick includes compelling interludes that let the spiritual elements of the movement resonate free of institutional constraints. The documentary offers chapter beats of direct address interviews in which Lapeyre frames participants in close-up and gathers their thoughts about the nature god, the afterlife, and what they’d like to reincarnated as in their next lives. The contemplative answers invite audiences to expand their consciousness.
Lapeyre relates to the complex relationship between institutional practices and spirituality, having grown up in an Anglican household. “I was raised Anglican and I was an altar boy in the Anglican Church, and I think I had a pretty typical ‘teenager in the 1980s’ response to faith, which is that I just wholeheartedly rejected it as not a rational response to the world,” he says. “But as I get older, I have sort of backtracked on that to a position of agnosticism. I’ll retreat into my one true religion, which is cinephilia. I always come back to the movie Contact.”
The 1997 film by Robert Zemeckis stars Jodie Foster as a scientist who pursues the possibility of life in outer space when extra-terrestrial signals reach Earth and spark a debate between science and faith. “There’s an amazing moment in the movie where Jodie Foster, who is an avowed atheist, is testifying to US Congress about why she should be the representative of the human race that makes contact with aliens,” explains Lapeyre.
“She’s challenged by Matthew McConaughey [who plays a spiritual leader] who says, ‘Are you really going to sit there and tell me that 95% of the world that has faith in something bigger than humanity is wrong?’ When I put myself in the same position, I ask if I can I really sit here and say that Stevie Wonder, who believes in God, is wrong? It’s hard to say that. I really hope that audiences don’t take away from the film that I think Krishna consciousness is wrong. I think it’s absolutely valid, but I think the institutionalization is where it went wrong.”