Actor Jeff Bridges, looking like a Malibu prophet with his bushy beard and surfer smile, talks about The Men Who Stare at Goats, which fictionalises a US military programme that tried to train soldiers to use mental powers as a weapon (and, yes, to snuff out farm animals by glaring at them).

Bridges plays Bill Django, the drug-gobbling guru and leader of a military unit devoted to the potential use of brain energies to walk through walls, transport consciousness miles away, befuddle enemies and obtain state secrets. Djanjo talks like a mash-up of Timothy Leary, Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Psychic Friends Network. “I find aspects of myself that match up with the guy, and I think about the people I know and my friends through the years,” Bridges says. “I went through those experiences too for the Dude character (in the Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski), and some people say this character reminds them of the Dude. I don’t see that, really. But, I guess, if the Dude somehow got in the Army, if he got drafted and he heard about this unit, the New Earth Army, he’d sign up.”

The film also stars Ewan McGregor, George Clooney and Kevin Spacey. Clooney produced the film, which was directed by his production partner Grant Heslov and based on the book of the same title by journalist Jon Ronson. The story is based on a real military programme and, as the movie states in the opening sequence, “More of this is true than you would believe.”

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