Undeterred by the cold moral sweat worked up over Lolita, Swain is caught flirting again in John Woo's fantastically furious shoot-'em-up Face/Off. This time it's with her dad, but it's OK because by the second reel John Travolta isn't really her mild-mannered FBI papa any more, he's a mad terrorist who's stolen dad's face.

To underline her character's innocence, Swain is transformed from punk to prom queen by the end. It's a saccharine aftertaste to an otherwise flame-grilled feast, but it's one with which the 17-year-old Malibu native has no qualms.

"I think there's more in it for everyone than a typical action movie," she says, as we relax on the patio of her neighborhood Starbucks coffee house. "The woman aren't just pretty objects that get grabbed under the arm by big action heroes. At the end I get to stab one of my fathers and shoot the other."

Starring with her childhood hero, Travolta, was the proverbial icing on the film contract.

"He's really funny, really smart and really nice. He would burst into song every 25 seconds and I would just be like, 'Oh my God, that's Danny Zuko from Grease.' Meeting him and Nicolas Cage was like, 'I'm supposed to be professional, but I'm peeing my pants."

As befits the film, her experience with Jeremy Irons on the Lolita set was more volatile. Sometimes Irons seemed a protective father figure but he also reacted sharply when she presumed experience beyond her years in telling him how he might play a particular scene. Moreover, the sensitivity with which sex scenes were dealt (Swain was not allowed to sit on Irons' lap without a cushion placed between them; the nude scenes, which she wasn't even allowed to present at, were played by a 19-year-old body double) did not extend to those involving violence, when Swain received a short, sharp lesson in Method acting.

"I thought it would be the most challenging scene, but then Jeremy really hit me and I really started crying, hitting him back and screaming my head off."

Pain, though, is something to which Swain is becoming accustomed. She claims to have broken her nose twice and been in seven car accidents since she got her license last year. "Everyone is convinced I'm accident-prone," she grins. "They wouldn't even let me walk down the steps in my trailer without grabbing my hand."

Yeah, right. It's hardly surprising that Swain's co-workers were falling over themselves to assist her - you don't need to be Lolita protagonist Humbert Humbert to appreciate the provocative mix of gawky girlishness and adult assurance of a real teenager living out her dream. In fact, she was so cocooned by those around her, that the film crew even kept poker-straight faces when she let rip during a take.

"I was looking in the mirror before I sit on Jeremy's lap. It was loud, but they tried to keep on rolling. I was thinking, 'That would be me'."

Taking on Lolita as her first role could have been suicidal: Sue Lyon, who starred in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation, never got another decent role. Face/Off and Swain's next movie Girl suggest that history will not repeat itself. After all, anyone who can get away with farting with older men as well as flirting with them, deserves a long and varied career.