Letter From London: 'God Bless Us, Every One'

The film is adapted from the excellent 2004 book written by Jon Ronson (pictured, right), a British journalist who has made documentary films on UFO enthusiasts, pop-star paedophiles, kidney-donating Christians, and Stanley Kubrick. In The Men Who Stare At Goats, Ronson travelled America meeting warrior monks, psychic super-spies, and a whole host of other military figures who have attempted to use paranormal powers to serve their country. It's certainly rich material, packed with drama, comedy and insanity, although, as the film's producer Paul Lister pointed out, it doesn't "really present itself as a movie", and the adaptation's method of solving this, by reinventing Ronson as American journalist Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) and superficially padding him with problems of his own, is clumsily shoehorned in. Still, the film's really all about George Clooney, who's a blast as New Earth Army conscript Lyn Cassady, and inevitably hogged the writer's limelight on the red carpets in Venice and Toronto.

"It's a very strange mix," Ronson told me. "On the one hand you're standing on the red carpet in front of 20,000 people and 200 paparazzi photographers, and on the other hand every single one of them doesn't give a f*ck about you, so it's kind of grounding." In fact, the whole 'George Clooney's making a movie about my book' experience has been grounding, he says, including seeing a version of himself being played by Ewan McGregor: "I wish it had been more surreal, watching it for the first time, but really I was just sitting there as an audience member, enjoying it. On my deathbed, I'll probably be bemoaning the fact that I wasn't more childishly delighted at things because I spent so much time being neurotic and anxious."

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