Ewan McGregor’s next films are surrounded by controversy. There’s Roman Polanski’s unfinished film The Ghost, a thinly veiled indictment of Tony Blair. The satirical The Men Who Stare at Goats, featuring George Clooney and Jeff Bridges, alleges that the US military engaged in “psychic spying” against the Russians. And in I Love You, Phillip Morris, out in February, McGregor plays tonsil hockey with Jim Carrey. But first, he’ll star as the young All-American Gene Vidal (father of Gore) in Amelia, Mira Nair’s Amelia Earhart biopic.

You play Earhart’s lover-on-the-side in Amelia, but the part itself is straightforward. What was the draw?

Hilary Swank, who plays Amelia, has been a good friend of mine for years, and we’ve always talked about working together. She called me about Amelia just as I arrived to start shooting I Love You, Phillip Morris, and we struggled for quite some time, but I really wanted to make it work dates-wise. So I literally made the two films at the same time, flying back and forth from Toronto.

What was it like working with Polanski?

He pushes you quite hard and always demands that you look for the truth of the scene and pushes until you get there, until you stop acting it and you start feeling it. But he’s also got quite a brusque manner, so you have to have a thick skin. He’s one of the very few completely brilliant directors I’ve worked with. To be an artist in terms of what you see and what you want to feel out of each scene, a kind of master of the technique and the technicalities of filmmaking, and a master of directing actors, which is usually the one that’s missing, is very rare. Roman was all those things.

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