Jon Ronson spends a lot of time immersed in strange cultures.

Researching his book Them: Adventures With Extremists, the slender Welshman hung out with skinheads, neo-Nazis and militia groups. Working on The Men Who Stare At Goats, he criss-crossed America interviewing members of the First Earth Battalion, a unit of the U.S. Army dedicated to exploring the possibilities of psychic warfare, among other things.

He specializes in the fascinating paradox of serious, dangerous people who’ve committed themselves to absurd ideas – like, say, stopping a goat’s heart through sheer force of will.

The film festival circuit, however, is something new.

“We were at Venice, in the bar at the Cipriani,” he recalls, “hanging out with George Clooney, and suddenly the pianist got up and another pianist sat down and started playing The Way We Were. It was Marvin Hamlisch playing his own song in a hotel bar. George Clooney was leaning on the piano with a tumbler of whatever he was drinking, and it was just like, ‘God, I’m suddenly in a movie!’”

It’s the first weekend of the Toronto Film Festival, and Ronson is doing a series of interviews for the film version of Goats.

“Three stories of mine were all optioned at the same time,” he says, sitting on a couch in a plush suite at the Hazelton Hotel. “There was Goats, there was Them and there was this other thing. And the screenplays all came in at the same time. Goats and Them were both absolutely brilliant, and the third one was terrible.”

So far, only Goats has been made. Of course, when Ronson wrote the book, it wasn’t an Iraq War buddy comedy with Clooney and Ewan McGregor driving across the desert in search of a vanished Jeff Bridges. The book is a much more straightforward history of the strange world of the First Earthers; the buddy stuff was added by screenwriter Peter Straughan.

“When I saw the film the first time, the thing that surprised me most was the warmth and buddy-movieness of it,” he says. “I just loved it – it gave me the same sort of warm glow that watching Little Miss Sunshine did. It’s weird – the thing that my book didn’t really have, that sort of buddyness, is what for me is the best bit about the film.”

It’s intriguing to hear an author who specializes in stranger-than-fiction journalism come out in favour of heavy fictionalization. I have to ask how he feels about seeing the story taken so far away from his book.

“It’s been quite an easy experience,” he says. “Plus, it’s probably pretty fortunate that I totally love the film, the screenplay and all the people who made it. I don’t know what I’d be like if I actually didn’t like something.”

The movie’s trippy attitude – as well as the presence of a Lebowskian Bridges as the visionary commanding officer of the retitled New Earth Battalion – may pose a bit of a marketing challenge. This isn’t your ordinary service comedy.

“It’s only in the last couple of days that we’re getting a sense of what the film’s place in the world will be,” he allows. “There’s a bit in the movie where they’re freeing the captives in this Abu Ghraib thing, and Clooney’s holding a baby lamb, and at the Venice screening I turned to Peter and whispered, ‘We’ve made a reeallly strange film.’

“It tends to make us all laugh – we’ve got a shot at having our moment in the cultural firmament, and it’s that fucking weird.”

Interview Clips

Jon Ronson on his unfortunate attraction to chasing stories that frighten him:

Ronson on the film's reception in Venice:

Ronson on the absurdity of finding himself on the red carpet:

Ronson on how he gets his extreme subjects to talk to him in the first place:

normw@nowtoronto.com