Mallorca home owner, actor and producer Michael Douglas attended the Karlovy Vary Film Festival over the weekend for the world re-release of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in its remastered version, 50 years after the original, a work that is unparalleled in the cinema of the last two decades, according to the New Jersey filmmaker.
The film, directed by Czech-American Milos Forman, produced by Douglas and Saul Zaentz and based on the novel by Ken Kesey, won five Oscars after being nominated in nine categories and marked Forman’s leap to stardom. Douglas recalled that, in 1975, other films nominated for the Hollywood Academy Award were Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, and Robert Altman’s musical Nashville.
‘Have there been as many quality films in the last twenty years as there were then?’ Douglas asked those attending the press conference at the Thermal Hotel in Karlovy Vary. Referring to Forman’s Oscar-winning film, starring Jack Nicholson, Douglas recalled the irreplaceable role played by co-producer Zaentz, ‘a big gambler, shy and a voracious reader’ who later did well in Hollywood.
Zaentz, a film executive and record label executive, won the Oscar for Best Picture that year, then with Amadeus, also by Forman, in the 1980s, and then with The English Patient, directed by Anthony Minghella, in the 1990s. ‘We were blessed by the presence of Saul (Zaentz), who managed to finance this independently,’ Douglas recalled, after Hollywood studios refused to make the film about the psychiatric centre.
Douglas, star of Basic Instinct (1992), Wall Street (1987) and The Game (1997), who received the Crystal Globe for his film career in 1998 in Karlovy Vary during the 33rd edition of the Czech film festival, also spoke about the political situation in his country. ‘I’m worried and nervous,’ he said of President Donald Trump’s administration, which seems to be withdrawing from multilateral diplomacy.
He described democracy as something ‘valuable, vulnerable and to be protected,’ although he added that it is up to citizens to take on this challenge. ‘We are flirting with autocracy, as in Hungary, and I hope that in this struggle we are facing, we will remember what the Czechs did to win freedom and independence,’ Douglas concluded, referring to the 1989 Velvet Revolution, a peaceful transition that allowed the then Czechoslovakia to leave behind the totalitarian communist regime.
The filmmaker, who turned 80 last September, said that after suffering from metastatic cancer, he underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy, refusing surgery, as this would have meant the amputation of part of his jaw, which would have made it difficult for him to continue working in cinema.
‘Having advanced cancer is not a holiday, and there weren’t many options,’ Douglas said, while expressing gratitude for the good fortune that has allowed him to ‘keep working.’ He added that now, after 60 years of hard work, he is ‘happy to have some time off’ and is also happy to see his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, active in the film industry.
‘Catherine is 20 years younger. It’s about maintaining a good marriage, and I’m happy to be a househusband,’ Douglas added. Douglas has owned an estate in Valldemossa for over 30 years and last year said that he would love to spend six months of the year in Mallorca. Well now he can.