10 Actors Who Didn't Know They Were Being Filmed For Movies

4. Most Of The Cast - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
United Artists

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is such an intimate and confined film that there didn't appear to be many opportunities for director Miloš Forman to catch his cast unawares.

Forman strove for absolute authenticity throughout shooting, even filming the movie at the novel's setting of Oregon State Hospital, where cast members were each assigned a real patient to "shadow" in order to get into character.

Some of the cast members reportedly even slept on the hospital's wards for the sake of further immersion.

But because this apparently wasn't enough for Forman, he also held regular character workshops during production to help the cast members develop the various physical tics and psychological facets of their mentally ill characters.

With these workshops taking place during principal photography, Forman was able to sneakily capture footage of the actors as they went in and out of character without ever telling them he was shooting. Some of this footage reportedly ended up in the final film.

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