COVER STORY : Wrestling Nixon’s Demons : The story of the 37th President is rife with conspiracies, cover-ups, blind ambition and even a little nobility. No wonder Oliver Stone jumped at the chance to direct it. On location with ‘Nixon.’

Billy Wilder approached Oliver Stone at a dinner party and asked him what motivated him to make a film about Richard Nixon. Such a negative character, the legendary director observed.

Hollywood’s resident iconoclast--a filmmaker who incurred charges of revisionist history with his controversial “JFK” and dredged up painful memories of the Vietnam debacle in the Oscar-winning “Platoon,” “Born on the Fourth of July” and “Heaven and Earth”--didn’t miss a beat.

“Nixon is the most important political figure in the second half of the 20th Century,” Stone replied. “He tore the country apart and nearly presided over a civil war.”

Still, those on the set this warm summer afternoon insist that Stone’s character study of the 37th President is even-handed, almost compassionate. The three-hour film--tentatively scheduled for release by Disney’s Hollywood Pictures on Dec. 20--paints the picture of a soul in torment, a man whose deep-seated demons played themselves out on the national and international landscapes with lasting and tragic results.

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The film serves up a man lugging around the parochialism of his stern Quaker mother and haunted by the ghosts of two brothers who died in his youth. A Whittier College graduate plagued by feelings of inadequacy and rage at the Eastern Establishment who dulls the edges with alcohol and pills. A President whose lifelong quest for public acceptance is sabotaged by the 1972 Watergate break-in that, two years later, forced him to resign.

“I view the Nixon project as the bookend of ‘JFK,’ viewing the same era through a different prism,” says the director, the son of a Republican stockbroker and himself a Nixon supporter until the early 1970s. “It’s a ‘Godfather II’-type film. The themes are grand, Shakespearean, in a sense.”

Casting the Welsh-born Anthony Hopkins in a quintessentially American role was another twist and took even the actor by surprise. Heading for breakfast with the director in London last February, he was filled with trepidation. The script, he told Stone over kippers, had more dialogue than “King Lear.” If the accent didn’t get him, lapsing into caricature might.

“I thought I’d be nuts to take the part . . . and crazy to turn it down,” says the Oscar-winning Hopkins (“The Silence of the Lambs”) outside Stage 30 on the Sony Pictures lot. Brown contact lenses pick up the tone of a chestnut hairpiece. The look is embellished by a presidential tie clasp and an American flag pin. “In the end, I opted to ride the fear and anxiety. Courage is something I’ve always wanted to have.”

Though Stone was asked to consider box-office draws such as Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks for the lead, the director says he’s glad the project turned out this way. Gandhi and Patton were played by people who were character actors at the time, he points out.

“With a big name playing Nixon, you’d have one icon meeting another and a possible credibility problem,” Stone says. “Though Tony has played kings and madmen, rulers of empires, he’s a chameleon--a barrel-chested outsider whose accent is more mid-Atlantic than English. He grew up poor like Nixon and wrestled with his own demons, so he’s made that journey on his own.

“Most important, he’s willing to risk making a fool of himself--unlike most actors of his age. Tony trusts me . . . even when I’m wrong.”

Joining Hopkins in “Nixon,” which is produced by Cinergi Pictures, are James Woods as Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Joan Allen as Pat Nixon, Powers Boothe as Gen. Alexander Haig, Ed Harris as Watergate conspirator Howard Hunt, Bob Hoskins as FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, E. G. Marshall as Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, David Paymer as press secretary Ronald Ziegler, Paul Sorvino as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, David Hyde Pierce as White House counsel John Dean and J. T. Walsh as top presidential aide John Ehrlichman.

It’s the 12th and final week of principal photography and the 57-year-old Hopkins--before the cameras on all but seven of those days--shows little sign of wear. Eschewing the airs of many stars, he eats at a table with the rest of the crew, quotes Goethe to a bell-bottomed extra seeking professional advice and, between takes, tackles a crew-cut James Woods from behind.

“Jimmy started out with a small part--he was almost an extra,” Hopkins quips, biting into the actor’s neck. “I complained that I had too many lines--and he took half of them. They call him the panzer division.”

If Hopkins signed on to prove to himself he was no coward, Woods viewed the part of Haldeman as a welcome relief from his usual diet of twisted souls.

“Though Haldeman was considered the Lord High Executioner of the White House, I play him as a loyal man of power,” Woods says. “Though he was at Nixon’s side almost 24 hours a day, the first time the President shook his hand in 20 years was the day he fired him. Nixon didn’t even know the names of his kids.”

Before the shoot, Woods, Hopkins and Stone took a field trip to Washington, where they conferred with real-life players such as Ziegler, White House counsel Leonard Garment and John Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.

“Here I was in a room for two hours with Oliver, the great iconoclast of the Vietnam War, and McNamara, the architect of that war,” Woods recalls in amazement. “McNamara was an old man apologizing, facing his ghosts.”

A visit with Elliot Richardson--Nixon’s attorney general who defied orders to fire Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox--also stands out: “I told him he was a hero of mine,” Woods says. “ ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Richardson told me. ‘You didn’t do anything at the right time. . . . I wish more SS men didn’t do anything,’ I replied.”

The film is billed as “a dramatic blend of historical fact, interpretation and conjecture.” But after the furor surrounding plot twists in “JFK,” Stone documented his research and sources more meticulously this time around. There’s a 189-page annotated version of the script he wrote with Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson showing the basis for references to topics such as J. Edgar Hoover’s purported homosexuality and penchant for gambling. Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield--who disclosed the existence of the White House tapes--was brought on the set as a technical adviser for political scenes.

Makeup, the filmmakers determined, should not be a crutch; far better to work from the inside out. Though Hopkins sports a 5 o’clock shadow and false upper teeth, Nixon’s ski-jump nose and tell-tale jowls are nowhere to be seen.

“Acting is about sketching in a couple of bold brush strokes--like Picasso,” says Hopkins, pulling from his pocket a dog-eared magazine photo showing a lonely Nixon, trousers pulled high, walking at San Clemente after he resigned. “I don’t know why, but I know the pain--the inner essence--of this man. Nixon was a self-destroyer with a strange, damaged quality. He reminds me of ‘The Caine Mutiny’s’ Captain Queeg.”

After Hopkins and his mother visited Nixon’s Yorba Linda home in April, Julie Nixon Eisenhower sent her a copy of her 1986 book “Pat Nixon: The Untold Story.”

“While I didn’t want to get too chatty in the thank-you note, I assured her we wouldn’t be riding roughshod over her father,” he recalls. “We show the civil rights abuses, the brutality in Cambodia, Nixon’s paranoia about the press. Still, I don’t know if I’m making him too sympathetic. The scene of Nixon praying [in the Lincoln Sitting Room] with Kissinger is some of the deepest work I’ve done.”

Today’s scene shows Nixon at an unscheduled pre-dawn get-together with anti-war protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in May, 1972. The weary President--never strong on banter--is trying to ingratiate himself by talking realpolitik and sports.

With the actual Lincoln Memorial undergoing renovation, production designer Victor Kempster (“JFK,” “Natural Born Killers”) had to create one himself. It took more than six weeks to make a mask of the original statue and carve a remarkably vivid 33-foot-tall, life-size replica out of polyurethane foam.

Financially, Kempster says, he was very hard-pressed. “All Oliver’s movies are equally ambitious--and he didn’t get enough money for this,” he says. “Though there’s the illusion of control, every movie is a fight to the finish.”

Clayton Townsend, producer of every Stone movie since 1988’s “Talk Radio,” agrees. “Sometimes I feel like a shoehorn, getting a size 12 into a size 8,” he says. “Somehow, we’re on budget and on schedule. Oliver comes in with a very clear vision and shoots fast. He has a great knack for watching his own clock.”

Stone first embarked on “Nixon” in the fall of 1993. The project gained impetus with the death of the former President the following April. Though he had no legal right to intervene, the director says, things would have been tougher with Nixon around.

Ironically, the film was nearly undone by forces from within.

“ ‘Nixon’ was a bit of a hot potato,” Townsend says. “Arnon Milchan--Oliver’s producing partner for the past three years--didn’t see it as a great commercial piece and, after ‘JFK,’ didn’t want to deal with the controversy. His shenanigans were the beginning of the demise of their relationship.”

Not according to Milchan, whose New Regency Productions later worked with Stone on “South Central,” “Heaven and Earth,” “The New Age” and “Natural Born Killers.” He did refuse to dole out megabucks for “Noriega” and “Evita”--Stone projects whose commerciality he questioned, he admits. But after months of haggling, he and Warner Bros. were willing to finance “Nixon” at $36 million, with Hopkins in the lead.

Stone says his partners were contractually obligated to make the movie at $42.5 million, the price at which it was eventually made. Though the shoot had to begin by May 1 if Hopkins was to fulfill a prior commitment, New Regency and the studio stood firm.

Fielding flak about the violence in “Natural Born Killers” and going through a painful divorce on the personal front, Stone was pushed to the edge. Freed by New Regency and Warners, he went out in search of better offers. Columbia, Fox, Turner and Cinergi stepped up to the plate.

Stone picked Cinergi, whose chairman, Andrew Vajna, then agreed to reimburse Milchan for the nearly $1 million he had invested in “Nixon”--and additional monies for other Stone projects at New Regency. Stone may have counted on coming back after “Nixon,” says Milchan, but their new, three-picture deal was history, as far as he was concerned.

“If Oliver went out and found more money, I take my hat off to him,” the producer says on the phone from Paris. “As a director, he needs to be loyal to the film--not to the money guys. Still, every movie has its own economics. ‘Raging Bull’ was also a great project but I wouldn’t spend a fortune on that either.”

“In the end, relationships are built not on money or cynicism but on vision and trust,” Stone maintains. “I’ll never be in business with Arnon Milchan again.”

Milchan isn’t so sure. “In the life of my company, Oliver was the flagship,” he says. “We are real partners . . . it was us against the world. Oliver is a spoiled child. But the two of us are lonely in Hollywood, surrounded by people who aren’t very exciting. We’ll work together again someday.”

Producer Townsend compares movie-making to a military campaign. “Advance work, diplomacy and battle plans are needed,” he says. “And casualties do take place.”

This shoot, Stone veterans say, is calmer than most.

“Oliver’s demeanor on ‘Nixon’ is substantially altered, much more personable and focused,” says Stone’s longtime cinematographer Bob Richardson. “He’s juggling six or seven things without a single outburst. If this is the result of Buddhism, his spiritual search, we should all be heading for that place.”

This afternoon, there’s a lama, or Buddhist teacher, visiting the set. Stone, a “follower of the path” for the past three years, will be heading for Tibet the day after the film wraps. Buddhists call movies “the double illusion” since life itself is an illusion, the director explains. About the impact of meditation, he’s more circumspect. This shoot may seem more serene merely because it deals with “white men in suits,” he suggests.

“I’m no monk,” says Stone, seemingly loathe to shed his Bad Boy image. “I have fun on and off the set. I haven’t taken the vows yet. Still, I’ve never been a screamer. I’ve only lost my temper twice--with Sean Young on ‘Wall Street’ and with a production manager on ‘Platoon.’ My sets are wild in a positive sense.”

Hopkins, intimidated by the swarm of extras the day before, wades slowly into the scene. Reading somewhat mechanically at first, he builds up to an emotional crescendo.

“Anthony is a very delicate actor who blooms from take to take,” Richardson concludes. “He opens up this petal. He opens up that petal . . . all of a sudden you have a beautiful garden--and you wonder where it came from.”

A pained expression creeps over the actor’s face as Nixon debates a protester who lost her brother in the war.

Young woman: You can’t stop it, can you? Even if you wanted to. Because it’s not you. It’s the system. And the system won’t let you stop it. . . .

Nixon: There’s a lot more at stake than what you want. Or even what I want. . . .

Young woman: Then what’s the point? What’s the point of being President? You’re powerless.

Nixon: No. No. I’m not powerless. Because . . . because I understand the system. I believe I can control it. Maybe not control it totally. But . . . tame it enough to make it do some good.

Young woman: It sounds like you’re talking about a wild animal.

Nixon (long pause): Maybe I am.

Stone, dressed in a light blue shirt and black slacks, peers at a monitor under a glare-reducing navy tent. Overseeing a crew of 150, 100-plus speaking parts and 4,000 extras during the 61-day shoot, he was on the set until 10:45 the previous night and looks rumpled by morning’s end.

At his side sits dialogue coach Nadia Venesse who holed up with Hopkins for an average of two or three hours a day prior to the shoot. The actor had to master complex American phraseology, slow down his jack-rabbit British delivery, and, to create a deeper register, transfer vocal placement to the back of the throat.

“It’s grueling, changing every sound in every sentence,” Venesse points out. “If we go too far, we overdo it. Not far enough and the audience doesn’t suspend disbelief. Still, digital sound takes some pressure off. If the cut isn’t right, we edit in another word from an alternate take.”

Capturing Nixon’s awkwardness was a far easier task. “I’m uncoordinated,” Hopkins admits. “I call myself a ‘motor-moron.’ Good golf, but I can’t run. And, then, there are my lazy areas--those things I know I can do well. Oliver sometimes calls me on them . . . but never in a harsh way. He doesn’t mince words but he’s no dictator.”

Just as he released “JFK” on the eve of the 1992 elections, Stone was determined to get “Nixon” out in time for the 1996 presidential campaign when the national destiny is again up for grabs.

“There are tremendous parallels between the Nixon era and politics today,” says the director, whose “Nixon in ‘96” buttons--part of the movie’s marketing campaign--trigger an eerie sense of deja vu .

“Nixon was the progenitor of [Speaker of the House] Newt [Gingrich] and [Sen. Bob] Dole,” he explains. “The concept of the Silent Majority and the emergence of the Republican South began at that time. Much of that partisan spirit is alive.”