WOODS: RIGHT AT HOME IN ‘BLOOD’ ROLE

James Woods let himself in the front door of a Hollywood Hills bungalow and began to creep down the front corridor to a brightly lit living room. Suddenly, the actor stopped and pulled his .38 out of a shoulder holster.

A message was scrawled in fresh, dripping blood on a mirror over the fireplace. It read: “Dinner’s ready.”

Woods’ eyes glistened. He spun around, pointing his .38 toward the kitchen. The floor and counter were littered with raw meat, vegetables and scraps of lettuce. The stove’s burners were turned up high. Smoke curled through the air.

On top of the burners, handcuffed to a ventilator above the stove, was a woman’s bloody body, clad only in a baby-blue negligee. Woods gasped, a look of horror on his face.

After a long silence, director James Harris softly said, “Cut.”

Woods’ eyes darted around the room.

“Jimmy, Jimmy,” he said excitedly. “I’ve got a great idea! What if we did a rack focus shot so you could get me in the mirror?”

Woods joined Harris for a lengthy debate over a camera movement, talking in the kind of technical mumbo jumbo that could only be deciphered by a lifetime subscriber to American Cinematographer.

One of the crew’s walkie-talkies began to squawk. Someone outside the house wondered if they were ready to begin a new take.

“Let’s wait and see,” the crew member drolly responded. “I think we’re going to be discussing the rack-focus question for a while.”

Well, what did you expect--James Woods in a comedy?

At 40, the actor whom Oliver Stone once likened to a high-strung racehorse has--by his count--done more than 125 plays, films and TV roles, appearing as everything from a college pal of Barbra Streisand (“The Way We Were”) to a troubled schizophrenic in last year’s much-praised CBS drama, “Promise.”

But it’s the wacko parts that have gotten the most attention. The psycho cop-killer in “The Onion Field.” The nasty gangster in “Once Upon a Time in America.” The gonzo journalist in “Salvador” (which won him an Oscar nomination). When Woods is on screen, critics work up a lather, dubbing his performances as everything from “harrowingly persuasive” to “profoundly affecting.”

Still, it hasn’t been easy for Woods to earn a big chunk of screen time. He once joked that his agent told him the only chance he’d ever have to play a leading man was “if there was a role of an alien from another planet.”

It’s easy to understand why many studio execs have a problem envisioning this likable rogue as an adoring father or a Little League coach. On the set of “Blood on the Moon,” a new (“under $4 million”) thriller that just completed shooting in locations around Hollywood, Woods had an unpredictable, disquieting intensity that seems perfectly suited for playing sinister loners and icy killers.

But this time he isn’t the bad guy. He plays a cop hunting down a murderer who has left his mark with a series of grotesque homicides. Of course, Woods isn’t exactly a good guy either. His character--a jagged-edged homicide detective--cheats compulsively on his wife, regales his 10-year-old daughter with police-blotter bedtime stories and handles suspects with a wham-bam fury that makes Mike Hammer look like a shy choirboy.

Woods says he didn’t have much trouble sizing up the character.

“I always know the guy’s motivation,” he said with a sly grin. “Because the script was essentially written about me.”

After spending an evening watching Woods work, it’s easy to see why people either love him or hate him--or both. Cocky, intelligent and enormously opinionated, he’s the actor as warrior. When the camera is on, he exudes the same fearless intensity you’d expect of Moses Malone driving the lane or Howie Long sacking a passer.

A lean, tightly muscled man with inquisitive eyes and a quick stride, this is an actor who views movie making as a protracted battle against various forces of evil. Describing his experiences on several past films, Woods said coolly: “If you survive a war, you win a war.”

“Blood on the Moon” is a film full of graphic violence, much of it the result of a serial killer’s attacks against women. Woods has few illusions about how these scenes may be received.

“We’ll probably get all sorts of . . . from the critics on our ending ‘cause it’s so violent,” he admitted. Yet he defends these explicit scenes for their “realism.”

“If you’ve ever seen a death--and I’ve seen three people get killed in my life--you know that it happens on a beautiful summer day and it happens very quickly,” Woods said. “But we don’t go crazy on that stuff. If you’re showing someone’s head being cut off, you don’t need to show it from five different shots. But you do need to show it once.”

Woods pointed to the door of his trailer. “You need the reality. If someone got their throat cut in this Winnebago, there’d be so much blood. . . . You wouldn’t know what color the wallpaper was anymore.

“I’ve tried to stick to the way things are really done. I don’t just wave my gun around. I asked (police procedure adviser) John Petievich how to handle it. And he said the rule is--wherever your nose points, you point the gun. He also taught me how to hold it right, which you’d never learn from any movie you’ve seen recently.”

Woods leaped up to demonstrate, holding an imaginary gun in one hand, pointing it at his visitor. (As is his tough-talking style, Woods punctuates his delivery with vulgarities.)

“I mean that stuff with Mel Gibson holding the gun with both hands. Come on, who does that?”

What makes “Blood on the Moon” so special for Woods isn’t just the part, or the opportunity to work with old pal James Harris, who wrote the script and gave Woods one of his earliest meaty roles in a little-seen film called “Fast Walking.” Woods is co-producing the movie with Harris, which gives him the chance, as he put it, “to do more than just read paperbacks all day” on the set.

In fact, after watching the actor prowling the set--debating reaction shots, chain-smoking Marlboros and reminding the sound man about “room tone”--many visitors might assume that Woods was directing the film himself.

The crew seemed to take his obsessive concern with each minor detail in stride. Patiently waiting for the actor to finish a lengthy conference with Harris, a member of the crew whispered to a companion, “Do you think they can discuss the dolly shot for an hour?”

His crewmate shrugged. “Easily.”

Twenty minutes later, after the camera crew had reloaded, Woods was creeping through the living room again. Even though the .38 in his hand was clearly a prop, whenever he aimed it toward any off-screen crew members they instinctively flinched, as if worried that he might have somehow slipped some live ammo into the gun. After director Harris signaled the scene’s end, Woods threw up his hands in frustration.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said, eyeing the floor, which was covered with patches of cardboard. “It’s this cardboard. I tripped as I came around. My feet tripped, but my head didn’t. Then I gyroscoped around, but you may have lost me.”

Woods reached down and began tearing up a swatch of the cardboard that covered the living room rug. Nearby, one of the crewmen groaned. “Oh, no, he’s not taking the cardboard away again.”

Woods was suddenly deep in conversation with camera operator Phil Sparks, jabbering in impenetrable movie-set shorthand. “I wavered there for a second, didn’t I? But that other move was OK, wasn’t it?” Woods asked.

Sparks nodded in agreement. Standing nearby, Harris watched patiently as Woods began another stream-of-consciousness dissection of the shot, punctuated with more obscure on-location lingo.

“I didn’t look odd to you, did I?” he said. “Just trust me on this. If you have me in focus and can see my eyes, then when I get over to that spot, you’ll just say ‘eyes’ and I’ll throw the glance and that way we’ll catch me throwing the glance and then. . . .”

Woods started to walk away, changed his mind and headed back to the camera.

“See, you don’t even need to wait for the beat. You just do it on (the count of) three. Don’t wait for the beat--I’ll take that into account. So we’ll go . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . .”

As he strode away, he sighed in dismay: “This is too much. Next time, I’m sending out for takeout food.”

At first glance, Woods appears to be a Hollywood nightmare--the actor who has always believed he knew more about film making than anyone on the set and now has the clout to prove it. However, despite the on-set grumbling and an occasional argument over camera placement, Woods’ steady barrage of queries and advice seemed gracefully accepted by all.

He was also accommodating to visitors on the set. Guiding a reporter around the messy kitchen-murder scene, he offered a helpful hint: “Watch your step, there’s blood all over the place.”

He was equally solicitous to actress Randi Brooks, who plays the murder victim. Caked in blood-red makeup, Brooks had to hold her breath during each long take as the camera panned over to her body, which was propped up on the stove, her hands cuffed above her head. As soon as each shot was over, Woods made sure Brooks had time to catch her breath and get her circulation going before the crew prepared for a fresh take.

“As an actor, you almost have a better perspective on what’s going on that anyone else,” he said, while eating chicken and rice during a mid-evening break on the set.

“After all, you’re the front-line guy, standing on the marks, in front of the camera. It actually makes you more alert when you have more to worry about. It’s as if you’re a basketball player who’s trying to make a shot from the foul line with three guys swarming around you. It’s actually easier than if you were all alone.”

Proudly noting the low-budget, streamlined nature of the film (“We’re making this entire picture for Richard Gere’s salary”), Woods insisted that the crew welcomes his input.

“They love me. And you know what? They know I’m right. I designed the shot today. Without tooting my own horn, I have a good directorial eye. The crew knows that I’ve done more movies than all of them put together.”

Woods dismissed the sometimes-heated debates on the set as healthy give and take.

“There are lots of people here you don’t see talking at all. And that’s because they’re doing it right. In fact, perfect. So I shut up.

“I don’t mind it when Phil Sparks tells me about a better expression I could use. I don’t say, ‘Hey, I’m the actor.’ I like strong people with good ideas because they welcome good ideas from other people.

“Listen, on ‘Salvador,’ Oliver and I had legendary fights. That whole movie was a nightmare from beginning to end. But it came out great.

“With me and Oliver, it was 90% love.” Woods grinned. “And maybe 10% hate.”

Woods also has a love-hate relationship with women. Scarred by his first marriage, he freely admitted having difficulties with the freewheeling single life, at least until he met his current girlfriend, Sarah Owen.

“I was pretty much beyond redemption until Sarah came along,” he said as he walked back to his trailer. “I was . . . fed up with all that. . . . Finally, I’m 40 years old and I’ve met this girl who doesn’t want anything else than to be terrific with me. She’s totally happy and she’s even a little bit happier with me.

“She doesn’t talk about needing her space and all that other. . . . She works seven days a week and yet still has time to make me dinner. And the irony is that she’s more interested in her work and satisfied by her job than all these feminists who sit around in coffee klatches and complain about men all day.”

Even during normal conversation, Woods’ often-coarse language erupts in rapid-fire bursts. (We’ve used ellipses whenever Woods’ language got too rough.) A former dean’s list student at MIT who quit months before graduation, he can unleash heady dissertations on everything from activism (he thinks actors who pontificate about politics are “shameless”) to mosquitoes (“the ones in Canada will eat you alive”).

But when he gets rolling on one of his pet peeves--be it feminists or lightweight studio execs--he really slips into high gear, like an ambulance driver with his pedal to the metal.

“I just don’t buy this whole feminist perspective where it’s a war crime if you open a door for somebody, or attempted rape if you light a woman’s cigarette. I’ve always hated that hysterical, polemical feminist attitude. It’s just a lot of . . . that comes out of too many . . . Jane Fonda aerobics classes.”

Woods was waving his arms in the air now.

“I just see feminism as very pedantic. It’s all a lot of noise. Germaine Greer and Ginny Foat. Ugh! Feminist demagogues are the loudest of all.

“My mother raised two sons after my father’s untimely death. She wasn’t a patsy. She had her opinions--plenty of ‘em--and she wasn’t afraid to live by them. But she was more of a true feminist than all these hysterical . . . artists with their aerobics tapes and their husbands on a string.

“My mother walked it. She didn’t talk it.”

For many actors who have achieved recognition after languishing in obscurity, success only heightens their insecurities. For others, it feeds a hunger for retribution. For Woods, however, success has been a tonic.

“Now the heads of studios call me up,” he said. “I call ‘em back and whatever they’re doing, they pick up the phone. I have no negativity. I don’t need revenge. I hold no grudges, no animosities. I’m happy they’re on the bandwagon.”

Woods cracked a huge smile.

“But if they want to get a hold of me, they better have a speed dialer on the phone, because it’s ringing all the time. And I don’t say that immodestly at all.”

In other words, he plans to go after the roles he’s always longed to play--and do them his way. He noted that the “Blood on the Moon” script originally contained a formula car-chase scene, which he said Harris had written to help attract studio interest.

Now that the film is being distributed independently through Atlantic Releasing--Woods said they’ve been “enormously cooperative”--the chase scene has vanished.

“I said, ‘Come on, let’s do it our way,’ ” Woods said. “If I wanted to do that... I’d just do a TV series or--no offense--another Taylor Hackford film.”

Woods lit up another Marlboro.

“The biggest mistake I could make now would be to play it safe. So what do you think? Here I am playing in a film about a serial killer and a guy who hates feminists. I want to live right on the thin, honed edge of the razor. Who needs . . . safe?”

Woods shrugged.

“I came up the mountain an inch at a time and if I have to, I’ll fall off it 2,000 feet at a time. And believe me, it’s windy up there.”