Making Act Normal: Ten Years of Following a Story I Didn’t Know How to Tell

When I started making films, I thought my first film should be about the meaning of life.

A nice, manageable subject for a beginner.

This was around 1994 or 1995. I was working with friends who would eventually become the producers of Act Normal, talking to people from different religions and trying to find my way into filmmaking. I didn’t have much experience, but I had plenty of questions. Apparently, I wanted to answer all of them in one film.

Then I met Robert.

He had recently arrived as the first Buddhist monk in Iceland. I phoned him, we had a conversation, and something about him—and about Buddhism—caught my attention. I began visiting him regularly to meditate.

At the time, I couldn’t have known that we would spend more than ten years filming him, on and off. Or that the film would take us from Iceland to monasteries in Thailand, with long pauses and unexpected changes along the way.

Looking back, I sometimes feel that calling myself the director gives me slightly too much credit. I was the person who happened to be there with a camera. The important part was recognising that there was a reason to keep coming back.

Before there was a film, there was a relationship

My connection with Robert didn’t begin with a clear documentary proposal. I was curious about him. I wanted to spend time with him and learn something.

He taught me meditation in a way that I found both fascinating and slightly puzzling. There wasn’t always a long explanation waiting for me. Sometimes there was silence. You would ask a question and get an “uh-huh,” a “yes,” or a “no.”

For someone arriving with questions about the meaning of life, that could make for a fairly short conversation.

But I kept going.

That relationship became the beginning of Act Normal. We filmed Robert going about his life: helping Thai people and other Buddhists in Iceland, doing the ordinary things that filled his days, occupying this unusual position as the country’s only Buddhist monk.

There was something interesting about watching him simply exist in that setting. His life was different from mine, but being around him also made those differences feel less distant.

Robert was funny, warm and very likeable. Those qualities mattered as much as anything he could explain about Buddhism. Spending time with him gave us a person to follow, even when we didn’t yet have a film we knew how to shape.

We filmed for years. Then we stopped.

I would like to say that I understood exactly what we were doing during those early years.

I didn’t.

We filmed for three or four years, roughly from 1995 until 1998 or 1999. Looking back, I would describe the process as rather unfocused. We were gathering pieces of Robert’s life, but there wasn’t an obvious story developing in front of us.

There was no great dramatic event we could point to and say: this is where the film is going.

Eventually, we stopped filming.

That is part of the making of Act Normal that I think is worth keeping in the story. It would be easy, now that the film exists, to make the process sound deliberate from beginning to end. As if we had patiently followed a carefully chosen path for more than a decade.

But we stopped because we didn’t know what we had.

The finished film gives those years a shape. Living through them was much less clear.

For anyone trying to make a documentary, I think there is something useful in admitting that. You can be interested in a person without knowing what the film will become. You can spend years working and still feel uncertain about the material. Sometimes that uncertainty leads you to continue. In our case, for a while, it led us to put the camera down.

Then someone saw Robert downtown

About a year later, one of the producers saw Robert in downtown Reykjavík.

He had hair. And there was a woman on his arm.

For someone we had spent years filming as a monk, this was quite a development.

We picked up the camera again.

I approached Robert and asked whether we could continue filming. He said yes. But by the time we returned, we were already late: he had married, and the marriage had ended. I remember it lasting around five months.

Life had moved on while we weren’t filming.

There is something humbling about that. You can spend years waiting for a story, and then the person you are following goes through an enormous change while you are somewhere else.

We couldn’t go back and film what we had missed. We had to begin again with Robert as he was when we found him.

The earlier footage now belonged to a larger story. We had known him in one part of his life, and we were meeting him again in another.

Robert’s sense of humour

One of the things I love about Robert is the way he brings a large subject down to a very practical level.

Leaving monastic life could lead to a conversation about identity, belief or belonging. Robert could also explain it through the inconvenience of trousers.

Robes were more comfortable. Trousers required remembering to pull up a zip.

Having hair again meant buying shampoo and combs, washing it, looking after it. As a monk, he could simply shave his head once a month.

These observations are funny, but they also tell you something about him. He notices the small, slightly ridiculous adjustments involved in a major life change.

That humour was part of the person I knew. It belonged in the film.

When you spend enough time with somebody, the formal subject you began with starts to open up. I had first approached Robert because he was a Buddhist monk. Over the years, I got to know his humour, his warmth and the way he responded to whatever was happening around him.

Those things gave me more to work with than my original, rather ambitious questions.

Following him to Thailand

After we began filming again, we followed Robert on and off through the next part of his life. Eventually, he decided to return to Thailand.

By then, it felt obvious that we should go too.

My friend Santos and I travelled with him, visiting a monastery in Bangkok and travelling to other places around the country, including remote forest monasteries.

Robert was an exceptional guide. He knew the world we were entering, and we were very much newcomers.

He was also perfectly willing to enjoy that difference.

I remember arriving at one forest monastery where we would be sleeping on the floor. This was already a small challenge for two rather pampered Western boys.

Robert helped us prepare by describing the creatures we might encounter.

He told us about little animals that could cause all sorts of trouble. A bite might make your foot swell like a balloon. You might be in pain for days. There seemed to be plenty of things worth thinking about while lying on the floor in the dark.

He frightened the living hell out of us.

We didn’t sleep particularly well.

When I remember making the film, those moments are still very present. Robert showing us places we would never have found on our own. His affection and his mischief. Our attempts to appear more comfortable than we actually were.

And, of course, trying to find something to eat.

At the monasteries we visited, the monks generally ate before noon. If we wanted food later, we would head down towards a roadside shop and see what we could find.

Sometimes there was popcorn.

There was always Pepsi.

I had started out wanting to make a film about the meaning of life. Years later, I was in Thailand, frightened of insects and looking for a snack.

Filmmaking can take you to some interesting places.

What time gave the film

The most unusual thing about making Act Normal was the time involved.

More than ten years passed between our first filming and the completion of the journey we followed. We weren’t filming constantly. There were visits, periods of activity, long gaps and moments when we returned without knowing what would happen next.

I don’t want to turn that into a neat method. Some of it was curiosity. Some of it was the relationship. A considerable amount was luck.

But the years gave us something we couldn’t have obtained in a short visit.

We knew Robert before certain changes in his life, and we were there again afterwards. We could look back at the earlier footage with a different understanding. Things we had filmed without knowing their place in the story became part of a much longer movement.

Watching the film now gives me an almost epic feeling, partly because I remember how much life passed around it.

I remember the younger version of myself who first phoned Robert. I remember the uncertainty of those early filming years. I remember stopping, returning, travelling and trying to understand what we were seeing.

The finished film contains that time, even though it can only show a small part of it.

My approach to the film

If I try to describe my approach honestly, it begins with being interested in Robert and letting that interest continue.

I didn’t arrive with the story that became Act Normal. I arrived with questions. Over time, the person in front of me became more interesting than the film I had originally imagined making.

That required a willingness to follow what happened, including changes I hadn’t anticipated and moments I didn’t immediately understand.

It also required Robert’s willingness to let us return. When I asked if we could film again, he said yes. That simple exchange made the next part of the film possible.

I sometimes joke that I was merely in the right place at the right time. There is truth in it. We were tremendously lucky.

Still, you have to be there to receive that luck. You have to make the phone call, spend the time, ask whether you can keep filming, and accept that the person you are following has a life beyond your idea for a documentary.

Act Normal grew through that process. It took longer than I expected and became something I couldn’t have planned at the beginning.

Seeing people discover it now

It has been lovely to see people finding Act Normal on YouTube.

A film that took more than a decade to make is now meeting viewers who can arrive at it in a moment. They don’t need to know the history of the production, the pauses or the uncertainty. They can simply spend some time with Robert.

But if you are curious about what happened behind the camera, I made a short making-of video about those years. It includes the story of how we met, why we stopped filming, what brought us back, and our travels in Thailand.