Following the controversial Natural Born Killers, Robert Downey Jr.'s falling in love in Only You.

In the new Norman Jewison comedy Only You, Robert Downey Jr portrays Peter Wright, a Boston shoe salesman who falls instantly and hopelessly in love. Marisa Tomei plays the object of his affections, a woman who is on a romantic odyssey in Italy searching for her soul mate whose name was revealed to her on a Ouija board when she was 11 years old. Unfortunately, the name of the man she is looking for is Damon Bradley. So even though Downey is 'Wright'... he's wrong!

For Downey Jr. this role is one in a continuing, and eclectic, career which in the last couple of years has seen him as the exploitive Australian tabloid journalist in Oliver Stone's explosive Natural Born Killers and in an uncanny performance as Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, for which he was nominated for an Oscar and won the British Academy Award.

As soon as Jewison sent Downey the script of Him, which eventually would be retitled Only You, the actor felt an affinity for the project. "I was laughing out loud when I was reading it. How great to be able to be paid to do the kind of film that you like to watch!" Both he and Jewison share a love for the romantic movies of the past, Roman Holiday being one of Downey's favorites.

In Only you, Downey and Tomei have the opportunity to recreate the famous moment shared by Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday at the Bocca della Verita (the Mouth of Truth), where legend has it if you tell a lie and put your hand in the stone carving's mouth it will be bitten off. Unfortunately, the cast was unable to shoot at the real Mouth of Truth as the church where it is located, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, was the target of a terrorist bomb shortly before they began filming in Rome, so the production designer built a replica. In the scene Norman Jewison encouraged Downey to do an imitation of Peck. "I asked Norman 'what does he sound like?' and he did it once and I repeated what he said, so I was basically doing Norman Jewison doing Gregory Peck!"

The basic scenario of the movie, falling in love with someone at first sight, was not far-fetched for Downey as his personal life had followed a similar storyline a few years ago when he met actress Deborah Falconer. "I said, 'This is it! I'd better seize this opportunity and get a relationship going with this person'. When my wife Deborah was in my kitchen and we were just starting to spend time together, I said, 'Do you know where the silverware is, and where the pots and pans are?' and she said, 'Yeah, why do you ask?' and I said, 'Well, you should probably get to know where everything is'. I thought that was pretty hip!"

For Downey filming in Italy was like taking a paid vacation. The production filmed in such picturesque settings as the small Tuscan town of San Gimignano, the Vill Borghese (Rome's 17th Century park), Venice and Positano, a small cliffside village along the Amalfi coast. "I did at one point declare myself the King of Positano," laughs Downey. "I had a bed sheet on and I demanded the key to the city!"

But despite the the luxury of working abroad, Downey missed California. "I'm such an American, I just can't stand being anywhere but home! I just think America works better than anywhere else. I think as messed up as we are, we've got it together. I missed the variety of personalities, the variety of food, TV stations... just choices! You've so many more choices in America than anywhere else in the world. I didn't realize until I'd been over there for a couple of months how patriotic I am, or how happy I was to come back and see Bill's (Clinton) picture going down the escalator as you come into L.A. Airport!"

As 1994 draws to a close, the scuttlebutt around Hollywood is another possible Academy Award nomination for Downey Jr. for his performance in Natural Born Killers. He acknowledges, "I've been pretty focused for the last couple of years and I've also been fortunate working with good directors. I think if you work with directors of that calibre, where you wind up creating stronger characters, then you wind up having a better likelihood of being nominated for an Academy Award. I just don't like setting myself up to be disappointed, so I'll just say, 'Yeah, that would be great. It's out of my hands'."

At the 1993 ceremony, as Downey stood backstage waiting to present the award for Best Achievement in Sound, he noticed a big table in the corner which was loaded with Oscars. "There were about 650 of them! None of them had the names on them yet because people would look at them and see whether they had won or not. And I said, 'Oh, there's a lot of those!' It's not as important as I was thinking it was that night."

And of Natural Born Killers, the controversial movie which might bring him his second nomination, he admits, "I'll be surprised if I wind up doing a film that is as violent as that again just because I think of the energy that you get into with it, and the mind-set that you get into. If it's possible for me to get through the rest of my career, however long that is, without having to do anything that gives people stomach aches, that would be nice!"

Downey's newest feature, Restoration, takes him back to Britain, and back in time to the 17th Century, where he portrays a physician, Robert Merivel, who gets in Charles II's good graces by saving one of the royal dogs. Recognizing the importance for an actor as he develops to generate his own material, Downey started rewriting some of his own lines in Restoration, a fact the director didn't seem to appreciate.

"Michael Hoffman said that I never think about how to say the lines that are written the best way, I always think about what else could I say, which is frustrating for a director, but so what? It's a plus if you have someone who has any talent for writing who ultimately should be the authority on their own character."

And of the extensive publicity schedule that befalls an actor these days after a film is completed, Downey laments, "I think nowadays the studio expects you to go and do what actors used to do, which was work your ass off after the film's done! Sometimes I think it's the most strenuous of all. Sometimes I wonder, does it make that big a difference? I'm just starting to formulate opinions on it. Give me until I'm forty, and I'll have something together!"