Take Downey's new opus Restoration, for example. Set in England of the 1660s during the reign of the post-Puritan King Charles II, this is the story of a wastrel doctor - played by Downey - who moves through debauchery into dedication to his gift as a medical pioneer.

Sam Neill plays Charlie Two, "the Merry Monarch" who revived interest in the arts, sciences and sensual pleasures. English siren Polly Walker plays the beauty both men, the king and the doctor, love. Meg Ryan shows up in a support role as a raving lunatic Downey tries to cure of her madness while she treats him to a cure for loneliness. David Thewlis is Downey's Quaker doctor pal.

Restoration, despite a modest $18 million budget, has a lot going on. But it turned into a nightmare production.

"You know," Downey muses ruefully, "I think sometimes it's just what is meant to be on a specific film." On Restoration, he says, "it was meant to be the hardest, most frustrating, endless, rewarding, wonderful, scary, laugh-a-minute (experience). We've been involved in this project for going on 18 months now, you know. That's just a long time. If anyone had been told how long a process this film would be, I don't think a single person in their right mind would have signed on to do it."

Restoration finally gets seen in public when it opens Friday. And, yes, the film had its own personality, says Downey.

"I really believe there is the script, the director, the actors and then there is the most important thing - the FILM! I really mean the film like a person, that the film exists, that the film has its own desires, that the film has it own energy that everyone has created by giving time to it." Downey calls it Film "with a capital F!"

On Restoration, the capital was larger than usual, Downey continues. "This film is out there and this has been a really hungry one, one that has really needed a lot of attention, you know, and one that's kept us up late at night a lot."

Just six weeks ago, Downey had hinted to me that Restoration was perhaps a disaster for him, a wretched experience that would leave him "so humiliated, so embarrassed" when it joined the ranks of his other failures. But Restoration is far from a disaster and now Downey is ebullient about the results, if still shattered by the experience.

The problem, he concedes now, is that a few weeks ago, Restoration was still a work in progress and Downey thought it was self-destructing. "It was just so hard and it was changing quite a bit so I didn't really know what was there versus what we had done. The film kind of kept growing and growing and finally found itself."

The original problems, he says, started with one of those test screenings that Hollywood studios favor, especially for action flicks and romantic comedies.

Yet Restoration, with its flow from early Tom Jonesie raucousness through romantic tragedy and on to serious dramatic passages as the Plague and the Great Fire intervene in the story, obviously does not fit conveniently into any category. Test audiences were mystified and then annoyed.

"The first time they screened this film," says Downey, "the test results came back very, very, very poor and I think that was largely because (it was) a period film. This is not the kind of film that is going to get your Toy Story ratings. So don't worry about it."

But director Michael Hoffman, whom Downey knew from working on Hoffman's Soapdish, the producers and Miramax officials all went into a panic mode and started trying to dramatically change Restoration to suit an audience that will probably never bother to pay to see it anyway. Restoration should appeal instead to the same public which turned The Madness Of King George into an art-house hit.

"I think the people involved in the film got very scared," says Downey, "and we went back and reshot these scenes and we tried to fix it. I think by trying to fix a film that didn't need fixing it turned into a big mess."

Some of the reshoots did make it into the final film. Some didn't. Re-editing continued for months, although today the film is closer to its original version than it had been at certain points in the tortuous process of post-production.

"Now," claims Downey, "Restoration is restored to pretty much what it was. So I'm really pleased with that."

Downey calls it "a labor of love" on which he did weeks of research on the English Restoration era, as well as working on an English accent that would differ from his English inflection for Charlie Chaplin on the movie Chaplin. He even tried to learn to play the oboe, as his character does in the film, although that was a musical disaster on set. Crew members finally begged him just to shut up and silently fake the fingering. Nevertheless, Downey was fully prepared.

Which allows him to reflect on the unique perspective that Restoration gives us on the 1660s, and on ourselves in the 1990s. "They really believed that they were on the cutting edge of science, of fashion, of food, of politics, of history. But they were just a bunch of stinking, foolish, in-the-dark, up-tight, pompous, status-seeking, just really ignorant people. As smart as they were in a lot of ways, you just look at them compared to what we know now. Then I think, oh my God, there it is: Just give it 300 years and we're going to be the next set of gropin' gorillas!"