The Ninth Configuration - Casting

Casting

Blatty retained Jason Miller, who had played Father Karras in The Exorcist, for The Ninth Configuration. Ed Flanders (once considered for the role of Karras in The Exorcist) was also cast; Michael Moriarty was set to play Captain Billy Cutshaw but dropped out of the production (he was replaced by Scott Wilson, who was originally cast in a different role). For the central role of Colonel Kane, Blatty cast Stacy Keach (another contender for the part of Father Karras in The Exorcist). Blatty had originally cast Nicol Williamson in the role of Kane, before deciding that the British actor was wrong for the part: "I was deluding myself. I so desperately admired and wanted him in my picture that I persuaded myself that he could be an American Marine corps colonel. I realised during rehearsals. He was magnificent, but there was no way he could be an American colonel. He came to Budapest and we rehearsed for two weeks. And we were coming up to the weekend before our first shoot on the following Monday, and then I remembered one of the people I'd strongly considered was Stacy Keach. And we found out that night that he was available and he was with us on Tuesday." Stacy Keach recalls the situation differently: "Ironically, I was the lucky benefactor of a Nicol tantrum in the late '70s. William Peter Blatty had cast him as Killer Kane in The Ninth Configuration (also known as Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane), and the film was being shot in Budapest, Hungary. Nicol was staying at the Budapest Hilton, and was allegedly trying to make an international phone call when, presumably, something the operator did or said infuriated him, causing him to rip the phone out of the wall and toss it through the plate-glass window of his suite. Nicol was fired, and I was hired to play the role. It was a great part, and I often reflected on how Nicol would have played certain moments during the filming. I have no doubts that he would have been brilliant, as he always was. We became friends for a time, and I loved his company."

Tom Atkins had a minor role in the film, and in an interview in January 2009, he discussed what the film shoot was like: "I have always believed that a movie about the making of that film would have been much better than the actual movie turned out to be. It was kind of a zoo from the very beginning. William Peter Blatty wrote and directed it and financed part of it by selling a home that he had in Malibu. His idea of getting a good ensemble effort from his actors was to take people over to Budapest for two months—the part I had might have taken two weeks in the States but he had us all over there for two months. All he ended up getting was 22 really upset, angry and drunk actors who had a lot of trouble showing up for work. I thought that the script was wonderful but I don’t think that Blatty ever got what he wanted up on the screen. I think a lot of us took the job because we would be able to go to Prague and Moscow and bounce around Europe when we weren’t working. He decided that he would put up the call sheet for the next day at midnight so that you couldn’t go anywhere."

Blatty himself appears briefly near the start of the film as an army doctor, and would later cast Jason Miller, Ed Flanders, Scott Wilson, and Nicol Williamson in his next film as writer/director, The Exorcist III (1990).