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BFI 53rd London Film Festival – Men Who Stare At Goats Press Conference


The Men Who Stare at Goats
15 October 2009

1. Were you at all nervous about what they might do to one of your labours of love?

Jon Ronson: No! Just when I was sending it, Nick Hornby said to me ‘don’t interfere, they know how to make movies, we don’t’ and so I didn’t interfere and I read Peter’s script and I thought this script is completely brilliant, and then I heard Grant and George were making it, so I was never nervous at all. It wasn’t my film, it was sort of an easy ride for me, I watched it as an audience member and loved it.

 

2. Were there long discussions between you and George about the movie you were going to make?

Grant Heslov: There wasn’t a lot of discussion, we both read the tone exactly the same way when we read it, we were on the same page. I had more discussions with Paul Lister, the producer of the film, about the tone, to make sure all aspects of the film, everything from the designs to the performances, the look, everything had to support the tone. That all came really from the book.

George Clooney: First of all, the book, and there was a documentary done aswell which was very funny, had such a unigue tone and I thought Peter just nailed the script. This is a script that’s been around town for a while, I was aware of it for a while and it was named one of the best unmade screenplays. So we were all kind of anxious to get our hands on it, and see if there was a way we could do it and Grant had the right ideas.

 

3. What did your military advisor think of the material, and the further discovery that it was based on fact?

Grant Heslov: He was surprised, but then we met some people that were actually in the unit, and he was an interesting guy, very straight ahead guy, his name was Jim Beaver and he does all the big military movies around town, so this one was a bit off the beaten path for him, he loved it.

 

4. Did you go home and practice some of the techniques that you learnt, and were you actively encouraged to do this by the director?

Kevin Spacey: Yes I can admit that I ran into a lot of walls in Puerto Rico.

George Clooney: Busted a few clouds, you know it’s funny, there are things that are made up in this screenplay, but the wackiest things are actually the real ones, when you read the book, and you read about them literally trying to run through walls, they really did try to run through walls, they really believed that they could.

Jon Ronson: The physics are that an atom is mostly made up of space and the wall and human body are mostly made up of atoms, to me the key word in this is ‘mostly’. The main wall walker was actually a guy called Gereral Soderburgh and he was going through a messy divorce at the time, and he told me that he subsequently turned up with a bruised nose, and decided if anyone asked he would say it was domestic abuse.

George Clooney: The Predator scene, that I do on Ewan where I smack him, is all verbatim of what this guy does to you.

 

5. How do the films characters compare to the men Jim Channon told you about when you were researching the book, and did you get to meet any of them?

Jon Ronson: Yeah I met all of them. The Jeff Bridges character; Bill Django, is based completely on Jim Channon, and looks and sounds exactly like him, and everything he does in the movie is real, from learning how to be invisible which he down graded to a way of trying not to be seen, like camouflage. Then George’s character is based on four or five different people, but they were all quite similar to each other, I met all of them, you see bits of Guy Sivelly; the Goats starer who now runs a dance studio in Ohio, and there are things that George does with his face that he did. He did show me his hampster staring video, which at the end the hampster gets up and dusts itself off, so it’s an inconclusive snuff video, so yeah is very very accurate.

 

6. How was it working with Ewan McGregor?

George Clooney: Ewan is, it’s sort of shocking how normal Ewan is, you know absolutely fun and normal. We would talk about the motorcycle trips that he takes around the world and down through Africa. He sorta fit into this group of actors that are really fun to work with, they’re all professional, and do their work before they show up, and so you get on set and there isn’t a whole load of misery before the shoots, there’s just rubber band fights and it’s fun, and food fights, but yeah, just absolutely fun to work with and a great guy, I’m a really big fan of his.

 

7. There’s a blurring of fact and fiction, did you approach the characters as real people or did you pretty much start from scratch?

Kevin Spacey: Yeah and no, to me it was all in the script, I think there are times when you’re playing someone that really lived, there is a responsibility to make that as accurate as you can and even It’s not an impression to embody that person, particularly if the audience knows who they were, but in this case nobody knows who any of these characters are so you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want and get away with it.

Jon Ronson: Can I just say that Kevin’s character was the most fiction of all the characters in the film, there was a guy called Sidney Gotleeb who would spike people drinks with LSD all the time, but other than that it’s pretty much made up more so than the other characters.

George Clooney: Sort of whatever the script calls for, we’ve done films like ‘Goodnight, Good luck’ and we had a great responsibility to make sure we got everything accurate. This was one where if you thought something funny could be had then you could just do it.

 

8. This was around Hollywood for awhile, was there a eureka moment for you to be the one to make and direct it?

Grant Heslov: It came to us about a year before and George and I both read it and loved it, at that point I wasn’t really pursuing anything to direct, George had done a film that was similar in tone to this, so it didn’t seem to be the right thing, so we let it go. Then about a year later I was thinking about directing something, and it came back across my desk, sort of accidentally, and I read it and I said I know what to do with this thing, George and I had a discussion about it, and decided to try and put it together, that’s how it came about.

George Clooney: Screenplays, when they’ve been around awhile, even if they’re really good screenplays, things get attached to them and tied to them and they get harder and harder to get made because you’d have like thirty producers and there will be other people brought on, and it gets this baggage to it that it really takes everyone from Kevin, Jeff and Ewan to come on board with it and play ball and have fun, on a film that isn’t necessarily a slam dunk, it’s not Transformers you know.

 

9. The idea of ‘All that you can be’ is obviously an important part of the story, how far do you actually think you can go when dealing with the paranormal?

Grant Heslov: I have a different take than Jon, Jon is a real skeptic, and I’m more hopeful, and have a bit more of a belief that some of these things actually are possible, the idea that some people are endowed with more psychic ability than I am, cause I’m not, I think exist but Jon you have a different feeling.

Jon Ronson: Yeah, I don’t believe any of it at all, it’s all nuts! My skepticism sort of feels like a black cloud of misery.

 

10. Why has it been so hard to make successful films about the Iraq war and the war on terror, are we now at a stage where we can?

George Clooney: Well there’s a couple of issues about it obviously, anything topical you know in Hollywood is going to be a couple of years later, cause you gotta write it, direct it and distribute it so you’re not going to be on the cutting edge, also I think we are a bit too close to the situation, and I think that it’s such a polarizing moment that it’s hard to make films that directly deal with that subject matter since we’re in the middle of it still. I don’t, we didn’t think of this as an Iraq war film, it’s a very different story completely, I’ve done an Iraq war film with Three Kings, which holds up and continues to be relevant, but I think this one is just a glancing blow at Iraq it just happens to take place there, I never felt it was dealing with the war.