Released in 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest took more than a decade, a family feud, a fired author, a fired cinematographer and a working mental hospital to make. Milos Forman’s film turned Jack Nicholson’s Randle McMurphy and Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched into two of cinema’s greatest opposing forces, and picked up Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay along the way. To mark the film, we’ve dug into the chaos, the casting near-misses, and the on-set stories that prove the production itself was often indistinguishable from the story it was telling. You can also listen to our podcast episode on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on Spotify, YouTube, and the ATRM website.

Here are 35 interesting facts about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

1. A Hollywood dynasty kicked the whole thing off

Ken Kesey’s original novel of the same name was published in 1962, and the man who fell for it first was legendary movie star Kirk Douglas. He bought the film rights almost immediately, then starred as Randle McMurphy in the Broadway production, and spent years trying (and failing) to convince a studio to back a film version. During a trip to Prague in the 1960s, Douglas met a young Czech director named Milos Forman and promised to post him a copy of the book, certain Forman was the right man to make the film.

The book never arrived. The Czech authorities almost certainly intercepted it. Forman assumed Douglas had forgotten him, Douglas assumed Forman had blown him off, and the two of them nursed a silent grudge for years over a parcel that had been quietly confiscated by a Cold War government.

2. The son stepped in when the father stepped aside

By the early 1970s, Douglas had almost given up. He was preparing to sell the rights, accepting that he was now too old to play McMurphy, when his son Michael Douglas, not yet the household name he would become, asked to take the project on. Michael brought in music producer turned film financier Saul Zaentz, who put up around $2 million to co-produce. For a while, Hal Ashby, fresh from the cult hit Harold and Maude (1971), was circling as a possible director before the project moved in a different direction.

3. Hiring the author turned out to be a disaster

The first screenwriter Douglas hired was Ken Kesey himself. It seemed logical, but it was not. Kesey’s draft clashed violently with what Douglas and Zaentz wanted, and he was replaced by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman. Goldman, who would go on to win an armful of screenwriting awards, later said, “the greatest award I ever got was the chance to adapt Ken Kesey’s novel.” Nice of him. Not so nice for Kesey, who was furious.

In a strange twist, it was Hauben who recommended Milos Forman as director this time. When Forman met with Douglas, he went through the existing script line by line, explaining exactly what he would do with it, and Douglas was sold. Forman’s 1967 Czech satire The Fireman’s Ball, a comedy built around a group of characters trapped in a single chaotic space, convinced him Forman could handle the ward.

At the time, Forman was living as a recluse in New York’s Chelsea Hotel with a friend acting as a go-between with his psychiatrist. He was, in other words, already halfway into the film.

4. McMurphy nearly looked very different

Jack Nicholson was far from the only name in the frame to play McMurphy. Depending on which source you believe, the role was circled by Steve McQueen, James Caan, Jon Voight and Marlon Brando at various points. Burt Reynolds even claimed Forman offered him the part over breakfast once, although nothing came of it. Picture it – the Reynolds moustache on the ward.

It was actually Hal Ashby, during his brief flirtation with directing, who first suggested Nicholson to Michael Douglas, and Douglas never forgot it. Forman liked the idea too, and when it turned out Nicholson wouldn’t be free for six months, they used the time to build a cast around him. One person who was not convinced was Ken Kesey, who thought Nicholson was entirely wrong and that Gene Hackman would have been a better fit.

5. Nicholson’s on-set reputation was a myth

During filming, Michael Douglas rented a house next door to Nicholson and quickly realised the actor’s famous “it all just comes easy” persona was a performance in itself. He could hear Nicholson rehearsing through the walls every night. Forman, hardly a man to gush, called him “the most prepared, considerate, generous actor. Perfect. I don’t know to this day if he’s crazy or not.” When Milos Forman flags you as possibly crazy, you are probably comfortably past the threshold.

6. Five major stars turned down the chance to play the antagonist

According to Michael Douglas, five big-name actresses passed on the role of Nurse Ratched before Louise Fletcher was asked. Playing a villain, Douglas said, simply wasn’t fashionable for leading women in the 1970s. He never named them on record, but other sources point to Jane Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, Faye Dunaway, Ellen Burstyn and Audrey Hepburn. A five-star line-up of refusals.

Faye Dunaway as Ratched could have been fireworks, while Hepburn playing against type would have been something else entirely. Fascinating to imagine, but hard to argue with where it all landed.

7. The final actress auditioned for months

Forman had been considering Shelley Duvall for the role of McMurphy’s on-off girlfriend Candy, so he sat down to watch Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974). Duvall was in the film, but so was a lesser-known actress named Louise Fletcher. Forman called her in to audition, then called her back, then called her back again. For six months he kept telling her she wasn’t quite getting it while also refusing to let her go. Eventually, he cast her.

Fletcher later said she was thrilled but anxious about two things: she had never played a villain of this kind before, and she was going toe-to-toe with Jack Nicholson at full wattage. That contrast, of course, is exactly what makes the film crackle. Controlled stillness against restless chaos.

8. Ratched’s look was deliberately dated, and Fletcher had a mischievous side

The actress wore no make-up on set, just vaseline on her lips, and chose Ratched’s severe 1940s hairstyle herself. She wanted the character to read as uptight, traditional, slightly out of time. In Fletcher’s own words, Ratched genuinely believes she is helping the patients, but is misguided and drunk on her own authority.

Fletcher herself was absolutely not uptight. Near the end of the shoot, she whipped her dress off in front of the rest of the cast and stood there topless, later explaining, “I was thinking ‘I’ll show them I’m a real woman under here.'” She then brought in a photographer, posed in her underwear, and recreated Betty Grable’s famous World War II over-the-shoulder pin-up. She signed the photos “Mildred” and handed them out to the cast and crew.

9. A young actor announced himself in his first film

Twitchy inmate Billy Bibbit is played by Brad Dourif, and the role remains one of the most convincing on-screen portrayals of a serious stutter ever committed to film. Bud Cort of Harold and Maude fame had been considered at one point, almost certainly during Hal Ashby’s brief involvement, but the part went to Dourif, making his feature debut.

Given the work, it’s no surprise he went on to carve out a long and strange career. He played the slithering Grima Wormtongue in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, voiced the killer doll Chucky across the Child’s Play series, and had a memorable run as murderous Betazoid Lon Suder in Star Trek: Voyager. A varied CV built on one extraordinary opening statement.

10. A future big star was a shoo-in

Danny DeVito, who plays the childlike inmate Martini, was already one of Michael Douglas’s closest friends. They had been roommates in New York in the 1960s, and DeVito had played Martini in the 1971 Broadway production of Cuckoo’s Nest. Casting anyone else would have taken some explaining at the dinner table.

He wasn’t the only familiar face pulled in from the stage version. Mimi Sarkisjan, who plays the quietly unnerving Nurse Pilbow, had also appeared in the same Broadway run, which is exactly why Forman brought her into the film.

11. DeVito invented an imaginary friend to cope

The shoot was long and intense, and DeVito later revealed that he developed a coping mechanism that might have worried him more if he hadn’t been surrounded by actual mental health professionals. He created an imaginary friend and held imaginary conversations with him throughout the production. Eventually concerned, he went to Dr Dean Brooks, director of the Oregon State Hospital (and the man playing Dr Spivey in the film), who reassured him he was fine as long as he could still tell his imaginary friend wasn’t real. A useful benchmark.

12. The Chief was found by a used-car salesman

Michael Douglas said the silent, towering Chief Bromden was extremely hard to cast because they were chasing such a specific physical presence. The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: a used-car dealer named Mel Lambert, who knew Douglas and phoned him at one point and said, in Lambert’s own words of the time, “Michael, the biggest sonofabitch Indian came in the other day.”

The man in question was Will Sampson, a Muscogee Creek Nation park ranger from Oregon and a serious painter whose work, according to Forman, hung in the Smithsonian in Washington. On-set footage captures Sampson saying, “I’m a painter. Don’t call me an actor.” Given the performance he delivers as Chief, he’s welcome to call himself whatever he likes.

13. Two of the cast were quietly unwell

William Redfield, who plays the verbose, contemptuous Harding, was seriously ill throughout the shoot. He was diagnosed with leukaemia by Dr Dean Brooks right there on set, and died in 1976, a year after the film’s release. None of it shows in the performance, which is one of the film’s quiet wonders.

Another cast member was struggling differently. Sydney Lassick, who plays the cigarette-craving Cheswick, became so deeply embedded in his character that the crew grew genuinely concerned for him. Filming the devastating final sequence, with the Chief smothering McMurphy, Lassick was only required to lie in a nearby bed, but he became so overwhelmed that he had to be removed from set. Doctors on hand quietly told Forman, “If things get out of control, we have the proper medication.” Useful perk of filming inside a working hospital.

14. Nicholson was ad-libbing from the first scene onwards

Improvisation runs all the way through the film. In the opening moments, as McMurphy is brought into the hospital by the guards, the script called for him to kiss one of them. Nicholson did it, and then Forman quietly told him to kiss the other guard on the next take to catch him off guard.

Another moment that smells heavily of improvisation is the scene where McMurphy refuses his pills from Nurse Pilbow, with Harding leaning in beside him grinning like an idiot. McMurphy rounds on him and christens him “Hard On.” Easily the worst nickname in cinema, possibly cooked up on the spot between Nicholson and Redfield.

15. The baseball game on the radio is real

When Ratched refuses to turn the TV to baseball, McMurphy ends up commentating the game himself for the patients. The radio broadcast feeding into that sequence is taken from an actual match. Specifically, it is Game 2 of the 1963 World Series, the Los Angeles Dodgers against the New York Yankees. It is essentially the only concrete clue the film offers about when it is set.

The commentary voice belongs to Ernie Harwell, a Hall of Fame baseball announcer who would be instantly recognisable to American listeners. Not a name you expect to surface in a piece about a 70s psychiatric drama.

16. The basketball scene was built on the fly

Josip Elic, who plays the lumbering, near-silent inmate Bancini, said the entire business of McMurphy clambering onto his shoulders during the basketball game was pure Nicholson improvisation. Elic then improvised his own reaction, wandering off absent-mindedly before coming back, with McMurphy still stuck up there.

According to Elic, Nicholson leaned in before the take and whispered, “If I fall they’ll close the picture down for a week,” to which Elic fired back, “If I fall they’ll close it down for two weeks.” Bold from a man whose character barely speaks a line all film.

17. Forman prepared the cast like he was casting a documentary

Forman put enormous work into preparation. He auditioned actors by throwing them into improvised group therapy sessions to see how they behaved. Part of the reason Sydney Lassick landed the role of Cheswick, apparently, was that he rocked up wearing a rope as a belt. A look worth considering.

Before shooting began, Forman screened The Titicut Follies to the cast, Frederick Wiseman’s searing 1967 documentary about the inmates of Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane. Forman said the film’s hypnotic fascination with human faces was a direct influence on Cuckoo’s Nest. Looking at the gallery of faces in the ward, it’s not hard to see.

18. They shot in a real psychiatric hospital

Forman insisted on filming inside an actual working hospital. Michael Douglas tried to find one, but every institution turned him down flat, unwilling to be associated with the film’s unvarnished portrayal of mental health care. Then he got to Dr Dean Brooks, the director of the Oregon State Hospital, who said yes on one condition: his patients had to be allowed to appear in the film. He saw it as an extension of their therapy.

Brooks ended up playing Dr Spivey, and another real doctor from the hospital, Prasanna K. Pati, appears as Dr Sanji. A negotiation that started with “can we film here” ended with the director, his colleague and a selection of his patients all making it into the final cut. Fair play, really.

19. The cast shadowed real patients, and Fletcher pocketed a prop

Forman and Brooks paired each actor with a real patient to shadow, getting them close to the rhythms and textures of life on the ward. Nicholson and Fletcher sat in on actual electroconvulsive therapy sessions. Some of the cast slept on the ward itself. Forman reportedly lived at the hospital for a month before cameras rolled, which somehow feels entirely in character.

Beneath the hospital ran the tunnels of an abandoned underground railway, and stored in those tunnels were boxes of unclaimed belongings from patients who had died without relatives. A grim detail softened by the fact that the cast were invited to rummage through for props. The ledger that Nurse Ratched carries with her throughout the film is one such item. Louise Fletcher picked that out of the underground archive herself.

20. A patient actually escaped during the shoot

During filming, a crew member left a second-storey window open and a real patient climbed out and fell, badly injuring himself. He survived, and the next morning The Statesman Journal in Oregon ran the front-page headline, “One flew OUT of the cuckoo’s nest.” Irresponsible and incredible in equal measure.

Production designer Paul Sylbert later described the atmosphere on set as “Bedlam, like a 19th century madhouse.” At one point, some real patients were pulled out of their wheelchairs and dragged across the floor for a scene, prompting Dr Brooks to come flying in shouting, “This has got to stop!” A reasonable request from the director of the facility.

21. Forman and Nicholson clashed constantly

Forman might have waxed lyrical about Nicholson in later years, but on set the two of them frequently didn’t see eye to eye. Forman wanted the ward to be chaos the moment McMurphy arrived. Nicholson argued the opposite: the place had to feel calm and controlled, otherwise McMurphy’s arrival would have no impact on the other patients.

On day one, Nicholson turned up in a huge bushy beard, convinced it suited the character. Forman ordered him to shave it off on the spot. Things soured further when Forman refused to let the cast watch any dailies, meaning no one had a clue how their performances were playing. Michael Douglas said the cast began to lose faith, and Nicholson was so incensed that he eventually stopped speaking to Forman directly, routing everything through cinematographer Haskell Wexler. That turned out to be a decision with consequences.

22. Louise Fletcher named Ratched herself

In Ken Kesey’s novel, Nurse Ratched is never given a first name. In the film she is christened Mildred, and the name came straight from Louise Fletcher. Nicholson asked her, on set, what Ratched’s first name was, and Fletcher invented Mildred on the spot. The moment where McMurphy returns from electroshock therapy, plays the fool, and then suddenly drops the name “Mildred,” was Nicholson’s ad-lib. Fletcher has since called it her favourite scene in the entire film – a lovely bit of invention.

23. Everyone except Nicholson was seasick during the fishing trip

When the patients hijack the boat and head out for their illicit fishing trip, almost every actor on board was genuinely, miserably seasick. Nicholson was the lone exception. Making matters worse, the sequence took a full week to shoot. Danny DeVito said decades later that just thinking about it could still turn his stomach. A rough week for Martini.

24. Watch carefully and you’ll spot a famous cameo

The pier sequence, where the crowd watches the patients struggle onto the boat, hides a couple of familiar faces. Among the onlookers, if you know where to look, is actress Anjelica Huston. She and Nicholson were in the middle of their long on-and-off relationship at the time, which explains the appearance.

The harbour master who tries to stop the patients boarding, meanwhile, isn’t an actor at all. He is Mel Lambert, the used-car dealer who had earlier tipped off Michael Douglas about Will Sampson. Apparently Douglas had met him on an airplane. Bonkers hiring practice, but it pays off in one of the film’s funniest little runs: McMurphy grandly introduces the patients to Lambert as “Dr Tabor, Dr Frederickson, the famous Dr Scanlon, Mr Harding…” Harding’s fury at being the only one denied a doctorate is a gem.

25. Forman wanted the fishing scene gone

For all the logistical nightmare of shooting it, Forman himself never really wanted the fishing scene in the film at all. He argued the entire story should stay inside the ward, so that the Chief’s final escape at the end would land with maximum force.

26. The book and the film are more different than you might think

The broad story is the same, but the details diverge in ways Ken Kesey never forgave. The novel is narrated in its entirety by Chief Bromden, while the film shifts the perspective to McMurphy. That was the core battleground between Kesey and the producers. Kesey’s screenplay stubbornly kept the Chief’s point of view, and Douglas and Zaentz refused to budge.

There are also dreamlike, surreal sequences in the novel, such as a moment where Ratched touches a wall and it begins to bleed, which Kesey wrote into his screenplay and which the finished film strips out entirely. Kesey had worked in a psychiatric hospital and volunteered for a medical study on LSD, and said that observing the patients while under the influence convinced him the real problem wasn’t the therapy or the straitjackets, it was society. That was the spark for the creation of McMurphy.

Book McMurphy is also a rougher, meaner proposition. He is prone to real violence and fleeces the other inmates out of actual money in the poker games, not just cigarettes. Suddenly Kesey’s preference for Gene Hackman makes a lot of sense.

And near the end of the novel, McMurphy is mentally broken by Ratched and begins to conform. Watching him fold, Cheswick feels utterly betrayed and kills himself. Grim territory.

27. The title comes from a nursery rhyme

The film and book take their title from an old American children’s rhyme. In the novel, Chief Bromden recalls his grandmother reciting it to him, and it runs, “One goes east. One goes west. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” Simple, haunting, and it sticks.

28. Kesey sued, and then refused to watch the film for the rest of his life

Ken Kesey was so furious about the changes to perspective and character that he filed a lawsuit, asking for $800,000 plus 5% of the gross. The case was settled out of court. He vowed never to watch the finished film, and right up to his death in 2001 he insisted he had kept that vow.

Another story Kesey apparently told near the end of his life is a brilliant one. Channel-surfing late one night, he landed on a film set in a psychiatric hospital and was immediately gripped, thinking to himself this was exactly how Cuckoo’s Nest should have been adapted. A minute or so in, he realised he was watching Cuckoo’s Nest. He changed the channel instantly. The pettiness is almost admirable.

29. The score was written by a rock-and-roll veteran

The composer on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was Jack Nitzsche. He had built his reputation in the 1960s working with Phil Spector, The Rolling Stones and Neil Young (which is the kind of CV that might send anyone to a mental hospital.) From there he drifted into film, scoring Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970) alongside Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and providing music for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) alongside Mike Oldfield. Whether in a studio or on a film set, Nitzsche had a gift for finding the loose cannons.

The eerie music that plays over the opening and closing credits was performed on a bowed musical saw, with wine glasses used as percussion. About as spiritually right for the film as it’s possible to get.

30. The film had two credited cinematographers, and the first was sacked

The Directors of Photography credited on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are Haskell Wexler and Bill Butler. The first on the job was Wexler, a heavyweight with credits on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). He lasted 31 days before being fired.

Wexler always maintained that he was dismissed because he was simultaneously working on Underground, a documentary about the far-left militant group the Weather Underground. Forman said it was due to artistic differences, specifically rows over how to light a hospital building that had never been designed with cinema in mind. Wexler, never one to undersell himself, later offered, “I know a lot more about shooting than Milos does.” Michael Douglas, caught in the middle, had already decided it was Forman he had to back.

31. Bill Butler arrived in the middle of an extraordinary run

Michael Douglas called firing Wexler the hardest decision of his producing career, but it was him or Forman. In came Bill Butler, who shot for 30 days before other commitments pulled him away, after which William A. Fraker stepped in to handle the fishing sequence.

Butler’s DP run into Cuckoo’s Nest is astonishing. He had just come off The Conversation (1974) and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). One, two, three like that is almost unheard of. After Cuckoo’s Nest he went on to shoot Grease (1978) and the Rocky sequels, before, somewhat inexplicably, drifting into the likes of Beethoven’s 2nd (1993) and Anaconda (1997). A strange career arc.

32. One studio wanted McMurphy to have a happy ending

When Douglas and Zaentz were shopping the book around the studios, 20th Century Fox offered to make the film on one condition: they had to change the ending so that McMurphy wasn’t lobotomised. Douglas and Zaentz refused, and ended up taking the project to United Artists instead. Quite what a happy-ending Cuckoo’s Nest would look like doesn’t bear thinking about.

The power of the real ending got to the cast too. Vincent Schiavelli, who plays the pale, spectral Frederickson, said shooting the final scene was genuinely upsetting. He was lying in bed for the sequence, actually drifted off to sleep, and was being given nightmares by the atmosphere. Forman woke him up with a sharp jab to the ribs and the encouraging note, “Stop moving, you’re ruining everything.”

33. Nicholson did a BAFTA speech in character

The year before Cuckoo’s Nest was released, Jack Nicholson won Best Actor at the BAFTAs for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Unable to attend in person because he was filming Cuckoo’s Nest, he pre-recorded an acceptance speech on set with the entire ward surrounding him. It is every bit as gloriously odd as that sounds, and it is presented by the great British actor and raconteur David Niven, which is reason enough to hunt it down. (We also, as a matter of principle, post it on X roughly every ten minutes.)

34. The film was a monster at the box office, and then some

On a budget of roughly $4 million, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest took around $163 million worldwide. An enormous return by any measure.

It also pulled off one of the strangest box-office achievements in cinema history. The film ran continuously in a single Swedish cinema from its 1975 release all the way through to 1987, a record that reportedly still stands. The Swedes, it turns out, were deeply into it.

35. And it won the big five at the Oscars

At the 1976 Academy Awards, Cuckoo’s Nest took home five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director for Milos Forman, Best Actor for Jack Nicholson, Best Actress for Louise Fletcher, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman. With that, it became only the second film of three to ever win the so-called “Big Five” categories at the Oscars.

The other two members of that exclusive club, in case you were about to Google it, are It Happened One Night (1934), which did it first at the 1935 Oscars, and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which did it at the 1992 ceremony. Frank Capra, director of It Happened One Night, sent Milos Forman a telegram after the 1976 awards that read simply, “Welcome to the club.” A perfect note to end on.

That’s our run through the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a film whose behind-the-scenes history is almost as rich, chaotic and occasionally tragic as the story it tells. Half a century on, Forman’s ward still feels like one of the most alive and alarming places in American cinema. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel for more film content.