Jon Ronson is a great journalist who has written some great books. Them: Adventures with Extremists is one of my faves.One of his other books, The Men Who Stare At Goats, is getting turned into a film starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor. I posted a photo of Clooney in the film a while back and the one above is also from the film.
In 1979 a secret unit was established by the most gifted minds within the US Army. Defying all known accepted military practice - and indeed, the laws of physics - they believed that a soldier could adopt the cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror. 'The men who stare at goats' reveals extraordinary - and very nutty - national secrets at the core of George W Bush's War on TerrorDark Horizons have a great interview with Ewan McGregor. He chats about his work on Angels & Demons, then moves on to saying an awful lot about his character in the Goats film.
I play a journalist, at the beginning of the film whose wife, who’s also a journalist in this small newspaper in Ann Arbor – The Ann Arbor Daily Telegram—cheats on him with her one-armed editor, Dave. And I see her flirting with him. But then she comes clean, and she’s going to leave me for this one-armed man, Dave.
I, in my misery, take myself to Iraq. It’s the beginning of the Iraq War. And I go to become embedded, but all I do is end up in a swanky hotel in Kuwait, and can’t get into Iraq. I’m not embedded with any troops, so I’m stuck in this four-star hotel, having wanted to prove my manhood by going to war, you know? Where I meet George Clooney’s character, and we embark on a kind of road trip through Iraq, looking for his buddies in this strange and secret section of the American Army.
It’s a very funny film, and I had such a lovely time working with George, and with Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. And it was the four of us, and it was just hilarious. It was great fun...We filmed it in – we filmed a lot of it in Puerto Rico. [LAUGHTER] Because it looks so much like Iraq..."
Discuss in the forum
HOME
