Back in the loop

Jeff Bridges stars in The Men Who Stare at Goats as a former army officer who studies psychic abilities in the art of combat. He also stars in the coming Tron sequel. Photo by Los Angeles Times.

Actor Jeff Bridges, looking like a Malibu prophet with his bushy beard and seasoned surfer smile, says he had a bit of a flashback while filming The Men Who Stare at Goats, which fictionalises the oddball odyssey of 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).

"I found myself remembering my own experiences in the 1970s when I hung out with John Lilly, the man who invented the isolation tank and did experiments with trying to communicate with dolphins," Bridges said.

"I was a test subject in the isolation tank; it was a box with about two feet of water and 1000 pounds of salt so you would float. John was a guy who would shoot acid - he'd inject LSD straight into his veins - and go in there for 24 hours."

And what did Bridges discover as his head bobbed in the silent darkness?

"Well, it's true that when you can't see out, you start looking in," he said. "Why is John wearing that Star Trek jumpsuit? Wait, what's really in this water? What if he's a mad scientist doing an experiment on me? You get carried away a bit."

If there was ever a movie that gets carried away with mind games, it's the quirky Goats, which also stars Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Bridges.

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".

In the film, McGregor plays the feckless Bob Wilton, a small-town reporter who loses his girlfriend to his editor and, to prove himself a man or a martyr, jets off to cover the war in Iraq. He meets an eccentric mystery man named Lyn Cassady (Clooney), who seems like a character plucked from the geopolitical farce of Doonesbury.

Cassady reveals that he was part 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.

Bridges plays Bill Django, the drug-gobbling guru leader of the unit, who talks like a mash-up of Timothy Leary, Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Psychic Friends Network. Chatting over lunch at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara, he chuckled at the "years of research" he performed in the 1960s and 1970s to find the tie-dyed textures of the loopy character.

"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 said.