TORONTO — In The Men Who Stare at Goats, Jeff Bridges plays Bill Django, a military man who returns from Vietnam to embrace the ’60s counterculture headlong - the whole Aquarian Age, flower power, altered states of consciousness thing.

But rather than drop out of the Army, Django is allowed by the Army to train a new squad of men: a group of would-be warrior monks who employ psychic powers to slay, but preferably sway, the enemy.

The movie, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and opens at theaters today, is an inspired and nutty affair that also stars George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor. Based onthe (yes) nonfiction book about government paranormal intelligence operatives, The Men Who Stare at Goats is no less loopy than Bridges’ character: a tie-dyed mystic, a marijuana-smoking visionary.

“I’m a product of that age, that era,” says Bridges, who turns 60 next month. “You know, I did a lot of things that folks did back in the ’60s and ’70s.”

One of those things was hanging out with John Lilly, the psychedelicized philosopher famous for exploring man-dolphin communication and developing the isolation tank.

“I was a buddy of John’s,” says Bridges, in Toronto for the premiere. “I was one of his subjects in the isolation tank, he studied my responses to it. ... So when it came time to do The Men Who Stare atGoats, I really looked back into that part of my past.”

Fans of The Big Lebowski, the 1998 Coen brothers cult phenomenon in which Bridges stars as the stoner sleuth “The Dude,” would say Bridges brought plenty of that character to Bill Django, too.

“I wasn’t really thinking of the Dude when I was doing this, I was going for a different thing,” he says. “But I can see how people would think that.”

Bridges, son of actor Lloyd and brother of actor Beau, lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., when he’s not working, although lately he has been working a lot. In a succession he cannot now remember, he shot The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Open Road (with Justin Timberlake), Crazy Heart (with Robert Duvall), and The Dog Year (with a border collie named Ryder)all in a row. And here in Toronto he’s looking to meet up with Joel and Ethan Coen, who have nabbed him for the John Wayne role in their soon-shooting remake of True Grit.

For Bridges, whose filmography includes The Last Picture Show, Hearts of the West, Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys and American Heart, an acting career seemed a foregone conclusion. After all, his first screen credits were on 1958 episodes of his father’s TV series, Sea Hunt.

But Bridges says he didn’t fully commit to his job until after he had shot The Last American Hero, the 1973 picture in which he starred as race-car driver Junior Jackson.

“Normally, after a movie I’m exhausted - a certain emotional muscle is exhausted,” he says. “I don’t feel likepretending to be somebody, I just want to be myself. And you get this feeling of ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this ever again.’ And thankfully, I’ve learned over the years that that feeling subsides, and then you start to get [a craving] to make another movie ....”

But in the days just after he shot Last American Hero, his agent called with an offer of a part: as Don Parritt, the teenage son, in John Frankenheimer’s big-screen version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Fredric March, Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan were already cast. And Bridges told his agent he wasn’t interested.

“About five minutes later I get a call from Lamont Johnson, the director of The Last American Hero, and in his very deep voice he said, ‘I understand that you turned down The Iceman Cometh?

...You call yourself an actor? By God, I’m disgusted with you!’

“And so I decided to do a little experiment on myself. I understood that when you’re a professional you have to do it when you don’t feel like it, and I said ‘Well, I certainly don’t feel like it, but I’ll just throw myself into this thing and it will probably put the final nail in the coffin of my acting career.’”

So Bridges made The Iceman Cometh, and over the course of the rehearsals and the shooting, the young actor bonded with Hollywood leading man Ryan and found himself hanging with the estimable March and Marvin.

“I had such a great time jamming with these old masters,” he remembers. “And at the end of that I said, ‘Oh yeah, this is something I can do for the rest of my life.’”

MovieStyle, Pages 38 on 11/06/2009

Comments

To report abuse or misuse of this area please hit the "Suggest Removal" link in the comment to alert our online managers.

Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.