Words tumble out of 16-year-old Leelee Sobieski's mouth, a stream of consciousness punctuated by exclamation points. Leaning forward eagerly, she talks of meeting Johnny Depp on the Warner Bros. Lot last year: "I was going to die! I said, 'Do you know I've seen Cry-Baby like 400 times, and I've been infatuated with you ever since I was six? I'm totally in love with you!' He looked at me and said [mock deep voice], 'Oh, no.' When my dad drove me home, I was crying in the car, crying, and I said, 'This is the man I'm going to marry!' My dad's like, 'Okay, Leelee, calm down.'"

In the new Merchant-Ivory film A Soldier's Daugher Never Cries, Sobieski plays the daughter of an expatriate writer (based on James Jones, author of The Thin Red Line) growing up in Paris in the '60s and '70s. Her performance captures perfectly the awkward truths of adolescence and makes you feel like you're going through it all over again. New York City born and raised (a casting agent spotted her in her school cafeteria), Sobieski now shuttles between Manhattan and L.A. She recently wrapped her role (no details allowed) in Stanley Kubrick's top-secret Eyes Wide Shut. "I was afraid he was going to be this monster, but he has this great personality," she says. "He was so debonair -- always touching his beard and thinking."