Jon Ronson has an important skill they can’t teach you at journalism school — affability. Affability is not a quality much associated with investigative journalism, but you can’t help but imagine that it’s Ronson’s easygoing friendly demeanour that has allowed him to get up close and personal with a vast array of strange characters.

The tolerance-preaching Klansmen, suburban jihadists and David Icke in Them: Adventurers With Extremists were plenty weird enough. Hanging out with alien abductees and Robbie Williams in the Nevada desert was weirder still. But Ronson’s The Men Who Stare At Goats — an alternatively hilarious and chilling account of US Army officials who co-opted the New Age philosophies, human potential movement and psychological research of the 1960s and 1970s — takes the weirdness to a whole different, government-approved, level.
Sitting in the rather plush surroundings of the Radisson Hotel, Ronson is all smiles and genuine good humour, as well he might be. Although The Men Who Stare At Goats attracted a lot of interest from film-makers even before it was published in 2004, it was a long time before the project got off the ground.
“As far as I know, because my memory is shot to hell, when I’d written four chapters of the book it went off to some producers. Ben Stiller’s mother read it and e-mailed me to say the entire Stiller family loved it!”
“There was talk that Ben Stiller wanted to make it and then early talk about George Clooney. Then someone else wanted to do it in 2012. But it was hanging around too long — I thought we were dead. Then George Clooney came back after about four years and rescued it, because it was definitely in danger of becoming one of those great scripts that was never going to get made.”
The resulting film — starring Clooney as a dance-loving soldier who thinks it’s possible to disarm the enemy with ‘sparkly eyes’ and Ewan McGregor as a hapless hack who gets drawn into the story of psychic army spies — is a slice of absurdist comedy inspired by Ronson’s research.
McGregor’s Bob Wilton is a small-town reporter. While interviewing Ann Arbor’s local nutter, Wilton hears the unbelievable tale of the New Earth Army and Lyn Cassady, its most successful alumni, who is notorious for killing a goat by the power of mind alone.
When his wife decamps for greener pastures with his editor, Wilton tries unsuccessfully to get himself embedded with the US Army in Iraq. After a chance meeting with Cassady in a Kuwaiti bar, Wilton joins him on the road into Iraq. Goats is essentially a buddy movie, while the story of the New Earth Army is told in a series of flashbacks, most of which appear in Ronson’s original book.
The story unfolds through Wilton’s eyes, and the more he learns, the more bewildered he becomes.
“Thankfully,” recalls Ronson, “the massive emotional weird journey that Ewan McGregor goes through didn’t really happen to me especially because I was going back and forward. When you’re taking your son to Legoland, it kind of breaks the spell. You’re in fucking weird madness, and then you’re back in your life and at the swings and then back in the madness again, so it was more sporadic.”
Better for your health that way.
“Definitely! Plus, my wife is such a cynic. When I was being chased by the Bilderberg Group [in Them] I remember phoning up my wife: ‘I’m being chased by the Bilderberg Group, I’m really sorry, everything’s gone wrong, I’m really scared!’ And she just goes: ‘Oh, you’re loving it.’ But nothing like that happened in Goats. I wasn’t as scared of the people.”
The First Earth Battalion, called the New Earth Army in the film, was the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, a battle-weary Vietnam veteran. Channon envisioned an army of warrior monks, able to win over the enemy with non-lethal force, using music, symbolic animals such as lambs and positive vibrations. Channon’s ideas found a champion in Major General Albert Stubblebine III, who was obsessed with the idea that, with enough willpower, humans could walk through walls.
“A lot of them were charming and sweet-natured. I think the reason they opened up to me and revealed these military secrets is because in a way, a lot of what they were trying to do was quite good-hearted,” says Ronson.
A lot certainly, but not all. Goats concentrates on the quirkier elements of Ronson’s research. The First Earth Battalion did indeed try psychic spying, remote viewing, walking through walls and invisibility, but Channon’s ideals were co-opted for more sinister purposes as well.
When Cassady and Wilton meet up with Kevin Spacey’s Larry Hooper in the Iraqi desert, the film touches on some of the darker aspects that eventually grew out of the First Earth Battalion, including torturing prisoners using songs from children’s television programmes. But as Ronson notes, including more of this material would have made for an altogether different movie.
“They made the decision to make it a feelgood movie. What the book does is go from very funny slapstick comedy and lurches to real darkness. I don’t know if it would work if the film had done that. The narrative rules in books are a lot looser.”
Goats is undoubtedly a funny movie, but director Grant Heslov avoids broad comedy, opting instead to allow the humour to be situational, instead of character-driven. It wouldn’t be out of place on the Coen brothers’ CV. Coen regular Clooney plays Cassady with a straight face and he is both a ridiculous and sympathetic character.
“That was definitely Grant Heslov’s big idea. He said to me right at the beginning: ‘The people in this story don’t know they’re in a comedy.’ That was his big directorial note and his job was to make sure people didn’t make it too slapstick — they thought they were in a tragedy. I think he’s done that well, I think that works.”
Ronson has since collaborated with screenwriter Peter Straughan on another project, but he decided a hands-off approach was needed for Goats.
“When he was half-way through writing it, I bumped into him in a Starbucks and he just looked like: ‘Oh my God, Jon Ronson’s just walked in!’ He was on his own train of thought and he didn’t want me intervening asking how it was going, and immediately I went: ‘Hello! How’s it going?’ The screenplay I’ve written with Peter now, there’s real people in it and I know, there’s no way I’d want them to be anywhere near me when I was writing the script.”
Although whole chunks of dialogue are lifted straight from Ronson’s book, he’s happy to give credit where it’s due.
“Screenwriters are often underrated, but a lot of the tone of the film, a lot of the jokes and the absurdity, is Peter’s screenplay. I’m slightly worried that some of the best jokes are Peter’s and not mine,” Ronson laughs. “I don’t know, maybe that’s just a weird self-loathing thing.
“I was watching the movie at a screening, and during the scene where George Clooney is holding the lamb I turned to Peter and said: ‘You know, we’ve contributed to a very, very odd movie.’ After years of struggling, I like the fact that this was our moment in the sun — out in the glorious sunlight of international fame — and the thing we’ve done is that odd! But that’s good enough in a way — to have contributed something very strange.”