Jon Ronson

LWLies: Where are you at now with The Men Who Stare at Goats?

JR: It’s finished. I believe it’s not too long until people see it. Shit! The iPhone software server cannot be contacted. What’s the big fucking problem!

LWLies: I guess everyone’s downloading it at the moment.

JR: I’ll try again. Do you know who’s in it?

LWLies: Spacey, Clooney, Jeff Bridges.

JR: Ewan McGregor.

LWLies: How does that feel?

JR: Well its funny how, you know, it’s extraordinary at first and then you adapt to your new circumstances and feel, you know, this is all I deserve! Which isn’t true. I went out there for a couple of days and watched them filming it and saw McGregor and Clooney doing dialogue from real conversations that I had 5 years earlier, so it was extraordinary. But you just sort of feel that your life will become fantastic. Of course that doesn’t happen, you’ve got the same coffee addiction you’ve always had.

LWLies: Have you had much input?

JR: No. But you know what that’s kind of how it should be. And in fact I’m now adapting stuff with Peter Straughan, who wrote the screenplay, and I wouldn’t want the people whose lives I’m adapting to have any input either. You’ve got to take a step away and Peter decided he wanted to take a step away from me to the extent that he even changed the name of the character who’s based on me. I think he felt he needed to have free reign to fictionalise whatever was necessary to make a good film, which is completely the right thing to do. Plus all this happened when I didn’t think I had the ability to write screenplays. So I would never want to interfere. Nick Hornby told me not to interfere. Not that I was ever going to, but he said ‘they know how to make films and we don’t’.

LWLies: You didn’t have any concerns that it might be ‘Hollywoodised’?

JR: Well until I read the screenplay it was just… it wasn’t happening. The film got optioned and it just felt sort of theoretical. And then the screenplay came in and it was so funny – Peter had got it so right. He’s changed loads and fictionalised a lot of it but he’s completely kept the spirit of the humour of it, and the sort of kindness. So as soon as I read that, it was a brilliant script, so I thought we’ll be alright. And then when I heard who was getting involved, again I felt safe. So, I have no doubts. I suppose if someone else had bought it and someone else was directing and starring in it I might have my doubts but not with the people who are doing it. I’m sorry if my answers are too ‘loveyish’. I suppose if I wasn’t happy I’d still say I was happy. But I am happy.

LWLies: Are you nervous about seeing it?

JR: Not really in a funny sort of way because it’s not my project. What I saw looked really funny. I’m confident it’s going to be really good.

LWLies: Is it a straight comedy?

JR: It’s not entirely a comedy. I mean, I don’t know – this is from reading the screenplay – but there’s some serious stuff in there as well. It’ll be like the book. It’s sort of a clash between funny and serious. It starts funny and gets stomach churning, and that journey from one to the other is part of the screenplay.

LWLies: What is it that attracts you to these things – conspiracy theories and the bizarre?

JR: Well, I suppose it’s mysteries isn’t it? It’s a mix of journeying into far-out places and hanging out with far-out people, which I always find really interesting – let’s go to extreme situations. And also, solving mysteries too. I’ve always – this is really pretentious – but I’ve always wanted my books, instead of being ‘by Jon Ronson’, to be: ‘a Jon Ronson mystery’. Like ‘a Nancy Drew mystery’. One day maybe I’ll be able to achieve that. I really like going off into this bubble of absurdity. That’s just when I feel most alive, when I’m in the middle of mad and absurd unfolding stories.

LWLies: It’s interesting that your first book was about living in the world of the supremely wealthy. Is there a similarity?

JR: Hmm. Well I haven’t done that much on the super-rich. I often think the most interesting stories are on the margins of society and that includes, I suppose, the super-rich.

LWLies: I heard something you did for Radio 4 a while ago about these networking events for the rich where everyone who’s everyone is there but no-one actually ‘knows’ anyone.

JR: That’s right; there’s that man who works for Mohammed Al Fayed and he was being an absolute scumbag. There’s another story I thought you were going to mention, about the man who thinks that everyone he employs is there to rip him off so he just stands glaring at the servants all the time. That’s a sort of extreme. Not to show the extreme, just to experience it from within.

LWLies: Maybe money creates those extremes because it gives you such freedom?

JR: Or maybe you have to be a nut to become that successful. I’ve always had that suspicion, for instance Bernie Madoff.

LWLies: Or Alan Stanford.

JR: Absolutely. The landed gentry, they’re sort of nice and polite, they’re fucked up like everyone’s fucked up but nice and polite. It’s the self- made people who have spent their life accumulating wealth, they have to have personality dysfunctions and disorders to just want to do that.

LWLies: Which sort of links into my next question which is about Stanley Kubrick, what led you to make the film on his ‘boxes’.

JR: Yeah, I’ll probably show this at Latitude. Well, that did sort of come to me because they contacted me because Kubrick had liked one of my documentaries. I got the invite to the house and, like everybody who was around at the time, the Kubrick house had the reputation of being like Xanadu – this mad hermit genius sort of thing, that’s how I imagined Kubrick. But it wasn’t really true. It’s true he didn’t leave the house much and had his quirks but he wasn’t a mad hermit. The house was always jam-packed full of people and he was a funny person. So I turned up at the house and it was jam-packed full of boxes, thousands of boxes, so I said ‘can I look through them?’ and they said ‘alright’, sort of nervously.

LWLies: Worried about what you might find?

JR: Yeah, and what I might do with what I find. Would I perpetuate the myths about him. Which I think I didn’t. I had to show the film to Kubrick’s wife and brother-in-law and so on. There was some lawyer in America who didn’t like it all but in the end we got our way.

LWLies: Well, the film does portray him, accurately, as obsessive.

JR: Yeah, but obsessive to the point that there was a purpose to it. I think what they were worried about was him appearing madly obsessive, irrationally obsessive and I think Kubrick, probably quite uniquely, his obsessiveness worked as a creative device. It just goes to show that that sort of thing isn’t always destructive. It’s definitely strange that he would have to see every doorway in London to find the perfect doorway for one particular scene in Eyes Wide Shut. But it’s what worked for him. It’s what he needed. You do wonder if it was a kind of a diversionary tactic, that he liked the search more than the actual doing. That’s why he made less and less movies, because he was using the search as an excuse not to make movies. I think that’s possible though I wouldn’t want to be a psychiatrist analysing from afar.

LWLies: The first time I saw Google’s Streetview I thought of Kubrick and how much he’d love it.

JR: And the internet in general. He died when it was still in its infancy because he wouldn’t have had to write all those memos because he could have just emailed them. I’m going on Streetview now to look at his house. There it is, I’m going into the house. Wow, look at that! Childwickbury. There’s the huge house, and the stable block. You’re right – he wouldn’t have had to send Manuel, his nephew, out to photograph Commercial Road for weeks and weeks on a ladder. He had to put all the films together to get a sort of concertina panorama of Commercial Road, getting them all developed at Snappy Snaps. And then when Kubrick looks at it he says ‘Well it sure beats going there!’.

LWLies: It’s almost like the image is better than reality.

JR: Well, yes that’s true but it’s also that he would rather stay in the mansion and get someone else to do the dirty work because he’d earned it by being Stanley Kubrick. That’s what I took from that story. At Latitude I’ll show some clips from that film, and something on Bohemian Grove. And I might show some of the actual conversations from ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’ that have now been dramatised. It’s great Latitude. I went to the Isle of Wight Festival a few weeks ago and it was really disappointing. It was just one giant dump, a big group of drunken, callow-eyed teenagers who wanted to get drunk and throw their pizza boxes everywhere. I saw this man and woman at about three o’clock in the afternoon, both dressed as cavemen, actually beating the shit out of each other.

LWLies: What’s happening with Them?

JR: Well, when a film gets optioned, they’re renting the rights and then they buy it. Universal have bought ‘Them’ so it bodes well, and Mike White wrote a screenplay that I thought was fantastic – just as good as Peter’s screenplay – really funny. But beyond that the downside of them buying your book is that you’re not really in their loop any more, which again I understand because it’s like when you provide the source material for somebody – and that includes being an interviewee for a journalist – when you’ve given them what they need there’s no need to contact them any more. That’s the same with the author when your book’s bought by a film company. So the downside is that I don’t know what’s going on but the upside is that they bought it.

LWLies: So you’re confident that it will come to fruition?

JR: I hope so because it’s my favourite book that I’ve written, I really love it. I mean one great thing that will happen with the Goats movie is the book suddenly gets back into the shops and for that to happen to ‘Them’ would just be fantastic. I’ve always thought, I’m probably going to sound like a bit of an old cunt here, but I’ve always thought that ‘Them’ didn’t sell as many copies as it should have done. I mean, I did think it was so good that it needed to sell as many copies as the Bible and be in every hotel room, so I did have high expectations for it, but I do think there’s a lot of people out there who would really like it but haven’t read it.

LWLies: What are you working on now?

JR: I’m working on a new book at the moment. A little bit of it is about to go out on ‘This America Life’, I’m still at least a year or two from finishing it but this really good American radio show, are taking a little bit of it as a work in progress. Plus I’ve just done ‘How to Find God’, about the Alpha course.

LWLies: Isn’t Alpha just supposed to make you consider the issues?

JR: Well, no, I think its real agenda is to make you get more soul. I think it is a sort of Christian conversion scheme.

LWLies: Almost like Scientology.

JR: Yeah, although I would personally say that if you had an evangelical Christian next to a Scientologist the one you’re going to get the most bothering from is the evangelical Christian and that’s really what Alpha’s about.

LWLies: Have you done anything on Scientology?

JR: I’m actually doing something at the moment and I’ve got to say – and I hope I don’t eat my words – that I’ve found them perfectly nice and fair and straightforward, and I’m going to say that in what I’m writing because I’ve been dealing with them on and off all year and they’ve been nothing except fine.

LWLies: Maybe they’re responding to all the bad press.

JR: That’s quite possible, or maybe the thing I’m doing benefits them. I’m not their enemy. But even so I haven’t had a glimmer of trouble with them and I’ve been with a lot of religious groups that have caused me terrible trouble. But, my hand to god, I’d sort of recommend them. I’ve got to say right now they’ve been fine. I watched the John Sweeney thing. Which I thought right from the word go was such a hatchet job.

LWLies: Their Press Manager was a bit of an idiot.

JR: Yes, he did make himself look quite bad. I gave this talk to a bunch of sceptics the other day and said if you watch it now, and take the anti-scientology hat off and watch it objectively, I think John Sweeney behaved worse then they did because they invited him in assuming he didn’t have an agenda but he had a huge agenda right from the beginning and all he did was feed it. I always think that polemical journalism – this is my view and whatever happens I’m going to slot it into my view – is quite a corrupt thing to do. I don’t know why people don’t go after Michael Moore, more. It’s full of deceit.