THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT : TROUBLES ON THIS FILM WEREN'T CAUSED BY THE CATS OR REPUTED BAD BOY KILMER.

Byline: Amy Dawes Daily News Staff Writer

Trouble, anyone? How about filming an adventure thriller in the wilds of South Africa with Val Kilmer, a star who recently had gained a reputation as Hollywood's most difficult and temperamental bad boy, and five ferocious male lions that, by nature, would rather kill each other than get along.

Trouble abounded on ``The Ghost and the Darkness,'' says director Stephen Hopkins, but it didn't come from the sources mentioned above.

``We had snake bites, scorpion bites, tick bite fever, people getting hit by lightning, floods, torrential rains and lightning storms, hippos chasing people through the water, cars getting swept into the water, and several deaths of crew members, including two drownings.''

But the lions, veteran performers who were brought in from Canada, California and France? It took several weeks for them to settle down and get used to each other, but once they went to work, they were pros.

And Kilmer? Well, according to Hopkins, he's the real pussycat.

``Val came to the set under the worst conditions imaginable,'' Hopkins says. ``He was completely exhausted from doing `The Island of Dr. Moreau'; he was dealing with the unfavorable publicity from that set; he was going through a divorce; he barely had time to get his teeth into this role before we started; and he is in nearly every scene in this movie.

``But I worked him six or seven days a week for four months under really adverse conditions, and he really came through. He had a passion for this film.''

Indeed, when Kilmer, as bridge-building engineer John Patterson, says several times during the movie ``I love Africa,'' he's not just acting.

Having acquired an interest in Africa from his adventurous grandfather, he has been visiting the continent for more than 15 years and is even writing an adventure screenplay of his own set in Africa. During the shooting of ``Ghost,'' which is a true story about a pair of ferocious lions who killed 130 men in a few months, Kilmer insisted on sleeping in a tent on the game reserve, close enough to hear lions roaring in the darkness.

Wasn't that a little unnerving, given the terrifying nature of the scenes he was playing every day? ``Not at all,'' says Kilmer, who appears surprisingly relaxed and friendly at an interview, given the hard time he's been getting in the press. ``I thought it was fun, and I'd even heard that the lions had escaped from their compound one night before I arrived.''

Well, boys will be boys, and insurance companies will just have to put up with it. Kilmer says he's taken much bigger chances in the past, having traveled through Africa in a Land Rover and slept under the stars in the Kalahari, parts of Botswana, and all over the northern Transvaal. ``In reality, you're more likely to be killed by a leopard, a snake or a scorpion than by a lion,'' Kilmer says.

In a way, that's what makes the true story told in the ``The Ghost and the Darkness'' so remarkable.

Set 100 years ago in a railroad work camp in Tsavo, East Africa (now Kenya), it tells the now-legendary tale of two man-eating lions who were so ferocious, aggressive and cunning that they managed to bring a British railroad-building operation to a standstill.

The lions hunted as a pair, climbed trees and killed for sport - unheard-of behaviors for lions. The names given them by the natives, who still tell their tale from coast to coast in Africa, were ``The Ghost'' and ``The Darkness,'' which became the movie's title.

When Patterson, in the employ of the British, arrived to build a bridge across the Tsavo River using a 3,000-member crew, it wasn't the elements that rose to defeat him, but the lions.

``It's a mythological tale,'' states Hopkins, who himself is British. ``The British Empire, which was arrogant and brutal but capable of amazing things, invades Africa, forcing its way into this magical, untouched civilization, and the first river they come to where they need to build a bridge, Africa stops them.''

Screenwriter William Goldman (``The Chamber,'' ``Mission: Impossible'') says that in addition to his Academy Award-winning script for ``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,'' the material is the greatest true story he's come across in his life.

He first heard the story - which Patterson recorded in a book called ``The Man Eaters of Tsavo'' - told around a campfire in Nairobi. ``I said to my wife, that's a movie,'' Goldman says.

But Hollywood wasn't so quick to respond. Though Goldman wrote the script in 1989, it bounced around for years (at one time, Kevin Costner was attached to play Patterson), with studios deciding it was too difficult logistically or that, because of its period setting, it wouldn't be commercial.

Then producer Michael Douglas and his partner, Steven Reuther, moved their company onto the Paramount lot and found the script in the company's archives.

Douglas loved the story, calling it ``an incredible thriller about events that actually took place.''

Goldman says he didn't make up a single aspect of the lions' behavior; even their incredible escape from a boxcar booby trap is true. But the character played by Douglas, a legendary lion-hunter called Remington who arrives to help Patterson track down the beasts, is a fictional composite.

``There were a number of hunters who came and tried to kill the lions, and wound up being helpless,'' Goldman says. ``But as for the rest of it, I hope the audience will understand that this really happened, because you can't make stuff like this up.''

Goldman admits that after much research, he's succumbed to a mystical explanation of the lions. ``My particular feeling is that they were evil. I believe that for nine months, evil popped out of the ground at Tsavo.''

Kilmer also favors a supernatural interpretation of what went on there. ``I would have liked to see more emphasis on that in the movie, but that's just my particular bent.''

In his own life, the 36-year-old Kilmer, whose sensual good looks helped him land the role of Jim Morrison in ``The Doors'' and Bruce Wayne/Batman in the recent ``Batman Forever,'' has had a taste of how it feels to be hunted recently, with the press blasting away at him based partly on reports of despicable behavior on the set of ``The Island of Dr. Moreau,'' including reports that he was often late and indulged in erratic behavior, had frequent clashes with co-star Marlon Brando, and once humiliated a camera operator by holding the lit end of a cigarette against the man's sideburns.

``These stories don't really matter to me,'' Kilmer maintains now. ``They are so incidental to my life personally, and people in the business know they aren't true. As far as `Dr. Moreau,' all the stories are the exact opposite of the way it was. Brando and I had a really good time together. As for the crew, I loved those guys, and I held a party for them.

``The problem is that things like this appear in the National Enquirer, where people get paid to tell these stories, and the rest of the media picks it up and plays it like news.''

But while the filmmakers, including producer and co-star Douglas, had nothing but praise for Kilmer, writer Goldman says it's crazy for people to think that making a movie is fun.

``It was not fun making the movie. It's very hard work, everybody's scared, we don't know if it will cut together, and when it does, we don't know if anyone will come see it.''

Hopkins, whose previous films included ``Blown Away'' and ``Predator 2,'' agrees in part.

``This movie encompassed the greatest highs and lows of anything I've ever done,'' he said. So, given all the trouble he had in Africa, would he ever go back there to make a movie?

``Yeah!'' he says without a moment's hesitation. ``I love it there. It's just great.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Pussycat?

Director of lions-on- the-prowl movie `The Ghost and the Darkness' says Val Kilmer wasn't a bad boy at all

(2) ``This movie encompassed the greatest highs and lows of anything I've ever done,'' says ``The Ghost and the Darkness'' director Stephen Hopkins, right, with star Val Kilmer.

(3) ``I thought it was fun, and I'd even heard that the lions had escaped from their compound one night before I arrived.''

Val Kilmer

on working in the wilds of Africa