Michael Douglas talks firing Kirk Douglas from ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

Movie-lovers have had 50 years to ponder if Jack Nicholson’s Randle Patrick McMurphy is really insane or if he’s just faking it — and, perhaps more importantly, if the entire world is nuts and the only sane ones are the people in institutions.

These central paradoxes are part of what makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest one of the all-time great American films. It won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress at the Academy Awards — the first movie to do this since It Happened One Night. (And only The Silence of the Lambs has done it since.) It was a particularly joyous occasion for its producer, a not particularly well-known young actor named Michael Douglas, who took charge of the dormant project from his father, Kirk Douglas, who had been unable to get it off the ground after starring in a stage adaptation of Ken Kesey’s groundbreaking 1962 novel.

In celebration of the film’s 50th, the movie will be back in theaters for two nights through Fathom Entertainment (July 13 and July 16; get your tickets now).

“I just think it’s such a treat,” Michael Douglas told Entertainment Weekly over Zoom from a trailer in northern Spain, killing time while his wife, Catherine Zeta Jones, is in the area shooting the upcoming series Kill Jackie for Amazon.

“A lot of people out there may have heard about this movie and haven’t seen it, or seeing it in a theater was how they saw it 50 years ago. [These targeted dates] are an interesting way of doing distribution,” he added. “I think they’ve hit a chord.”

With that, Douglas was eager to reflect on this early success of his.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When did you know you really had something with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: We just started watching the dailies, [co-producer] Saul [Zaentz] and I, with [director] Miloš [Forman] puffing on his pipe. He didn’t want actors seeing the dailies at first, but Jack [Nicholson] in particular was feeling uncertain. So we took Jack in to see some scenes and — I can’t believe how good this is.

I have reaction scenes of Jack in the group therapy sessions, not saying a word. He’s just listening to the conversations, and you can’t take your eye off him. It’s something I always talked about with acting classes. It’s not about talking, it’s about listening. So, just seeing this, we knew that the performances were magic. 

Then I invited my father for the first screening. I was more than a little nervous. This project meant a tremendous amount to him, and I know how rare it is when you have a good part. Seeing it for the first time with the music and everything, wow. Dad was just blown away, and he couldn’t have been more complimentary about Jack. We knew it was pretty good. So that was all the more bizarre when we took this film all finished, the exact same movie that got nine Academy Award nominations, we took it down to Hollywood to try to get a distributor, and all the studios turned it down. That has always stayed in my mind, in my future, when I got rejected by studios for projects. If you really believe in it… We knew we had something special.

Glad you mentioned your father’s attachment to the part. What was it like, essentially firing him from the job?

It wasn’t easy!

He had acquired the book in galley form before it had even been released, and had it adapted into a play by Dale Wasserman. It went to Broadway, and at the height of his career. This was right after Spartacus; he was one of the biggest stars, and the idea was to do it as a play, then as a movie. He tried it for years but wasn’t able to get any traction on making it.

I had read the book in my second year in college in 20th Century American Lit. I loved it, I’d seen the play with Dad, and when I heard that he was going to sell it, I said, “Give me a chance. I’ll run with it. I’ll try to get it set up and try to get you as the actor in it.” He said, “Sure.” It hadn’t been going anywhere. I’m sure there’s a part of him thinking it’ll be a good learning experience for the kid, right? 

Then it’s close to 15 years later. When he’d done the show on Broadway, his career was in a different place — and different age-wise. So yes, that was my job: having to tell my dad.

And as a young actor, I knew how few really good parts there are in your career, and this is one of maybe four, you know, great parts that he could have had. So it wasn’t just like another movie. I think he was a little… Well, he didn’t say much. He understood it. And then, after it all happened, because I gave him half of my producing deal, he would say he made more money off of that than any movie he had ever made before as an actor.

So that helped! And the fact that Jack Nicholson gave such a great performance. When he saw the picture, he reached out to Jack with a note [and] told him what a good job he did. So we had a running joke, more than anything. “Yeah, yeah, he wouldn’t even cast me in his picture.”

But I’m eternally grateful for his good taste, to find that piece of material, and I’m certainly really grateful, in terms of our relationship, that it was a good picture.

Miloš Forman was still very new to Hollywood, so it was a big bet to have him direct this. Of course, he continued with a tremendous career — I’m sure that made you proud.

The night of the Oscars, after we all won, I went to Miloš, I said, “Man, it doesn’t get any better than this. Savor, this is the best it’s ever going to get, man.” So when I saw him after Amadeus [which won eight Oscars to Cuckoo’s Nest‘s five, including Best Picture and Best Director], he said “Yeah, yeah, Mikey D., Mikey D., this is the best it’s gonna get, huh?”

Cuckoo’s Nest really helped cement the “Jack” persona for Jack Nicholson, wouldn’t you say?

Before this part, he’d been in Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider. He’d been sort of the young intellectual, but he never had that sort of grit. But it was Hal Ashby, who was making The Last Detail, who told us, “Come take a look at this.” That was the first role he played where he had that kind of gravitas, and that went on from Cuckoo’s Nest and other roles.

You know, Gene Hackman passed on it. Marlon Brando passed on it. Miloš had a wacky idea about Burt Reynolds for a while. “Burt Reynolds has cheap charisma!” he used to say. But once Hal showed us a couple of scenes from The Last Detail, we knew.

Did you ever consider a part in the film for yourself?

Secretly, as we were going through this very lengthy casting process, because we had to wait about six months for Jack for another picture that he was doing, which I think is what helped make it so strong. There’s a part of me that says, you know, I can play the Billy Bibbit part. But I was sort of hesitant. I didn’t bring it up yet. I thought it was a little presumptuous for me in my first production role. Then Brad Dourif did his audition, and he killed it. And I said, “Well, that’s that.” I think it was Brad’s first movie.

How about casting Nurse Ratched?

Every actress, every name actress, turns the part down, because in 1973/74, under the Women’s Liberation Movement, it was not cool to play a villain. It wasn’t cool to play a bitch. So Geraldine Page and Anne Bancroft, five actresses, turned the part down. Louise Fletcher had a small part in a Robert Altman picture [Thieves Like Us] and did a test for us. She was perfect, but she had that little voice, too. You know, she had a little voice, but those steely blue eyes, which Ken Kesey talked about in the book. She was a lovely lady and came out of nowhere.

Was that the hardest part to cast?

No, the biggest and toughest one was the Chief.

I was flying back to New York one day, and I was sitting next to a guy named Mel Lambert from Mel Lambert Motors in Oregon. He sold used cars, but he was also a rodeo announcer, and he was going back for a rodeo at Madison Square Garden or something. His father was an Indian agent, so he used to sell a lot of cars to Indians up in that area. So I said, listen, we’re looking for a really big Indian. 

So he suggests Will Sampson. He was a forest ranger in Yakima, Wash. We go to meet him at the airport, just to meet him — he’s going to turn around and go back. So we’re waiting for him at the gate, and he comes out, and with his cowboy boots on and his hat, he’s close to seven feet. He has long hair. And Jack just goes, “It’s the Chief! It’s the Chief! I can’t believe it.” I said, “Can he talk?” But [the character, who is mute] doesn’t have to talk!

So we fell so in love with him. We chartered a little prop plane from Portland to take us down to Eugene, Ore., and it wasn’t big enough for all of us. And so the Chief, Will, he sat in the seat next to the pilot, and Jack had to sit on his lap the whole time, and he kept saying, “I can’t believe it, it’s the Chief!”

Ken Kesey lived many lives between publishing this book in 1962 and this movie coming out in 1975. I know that there was some acrimony with him on the production.

He wrote a draft of the screenplay, and it didn’t work out, which is not unusual. A lot of novelists have a very tough time transferring their book into a screenplay. Now, he didn’t believe in contracts, so we gave him a percentage. Then he said, “Well, since I wrote the screenplay, I get twice the percentage you’re offering me.” We said, “No, we told you; whether you write it or not, you’re going to have a percentage anyway.” So he carried this wound. And he gained a lot of support from writers about how we were ripping him off. Finally, Saul said I’m not going to fight this anymore, so we’re going to turn over, I think, three and a half million dollars to the University of Oregon, and we’re going to create the Ken Kesey Chair in English Literature. That settled things pretty quickly, but he said, “I’ll take the money. Thank you very much.”

There’s a fun new documentary on Jaws, and in it, Steven Spielberg says that he, too, would have voted for Cuckoo’s Nest for Best Picture that year.

[To Steven Spielberg]: Thank you!

What was in the water in 1975 — other than the shark — that made it such an incredible selection?

In terms of your five best pictures, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Barry Lyndon, Nashville, and us — these were auteur-driven, from the talent, the creative side. Before things became homogenized by the studios in terms of looking for a broader audience, rather than making something as individuals. You look back at them, those were all individual statements as films.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.