Diane Kruger knows what it feels like to be Hollywood's hot new find. Just like she knows what it's like to get burned.

Only three years ago, the 31-year-old German actress was being lauded as a star-on-the-rise after being cast opposite Brad Pitt in the epic Troy.

At least until people saw the finished product.

"I feel my career started the wrong way around," she says now during interviews for National Treasure: Book of Secrets.

"Troy was my second movie. It wasn't very much of a part and the movie didn't turn out like everyone thought it would, I think. It put a lot of light on me for nothing. I had no experience. I feel like in America, I have to take smaller movies and make small movies to show I can actually act, and that I'm not just Helen of Troy."

Kruger's disappointment with Troy's failure was tempered by a healthy career in Europe, where she continues to live. Not surprisingly, she has no plans to immigrate to Los Angeles anytime soon.

"It drives me nuts to just be around movie people all the time. (With them) it's always the next hot thing, the next project -- I need a real life and real people.

"If I believed the hype, I'd probably be without my panties on in some nightclub."

THEY WENT BAT-AWAY: After he tangles with the Joker this summer in The Dark Knight, Christian Bale will next face off against ... uh, Batman? The 33-year-old British actor has signed to star as a battle-scarred John Connor in a fourth Terminator film, entitled Terminator Salvation. The movie -- which won't star Arnold Schwarzenegger -- will be the first in the franchise to take place in the post-judgment-day future only glimpsed in previous instalments. Thing is, Terminator: Salvation will land in theatres for Warner Bros. in summer 2009 -- pitting it against the studio's ill-advised Justice League of America movie with a Bale-less Caped Crusader.

AVATAR DELAYED: After you've waited a decade for a new James Cameron film, what's another six months? So reasons Fox, which has shunted Cameron's much-anticipated return to mega-budget filmmaking -- the 3-D science-fiction extravaganza Avatar -- ahead from May 2009 to December 2009. The extra time will reportedly allow the notorious perfectionist to fine-tune the epic, which will now debut 12 years to the weekend that Cameron's last movie bowed. It was called Titanic. Maybe you've heard of it.

LA BELLE OF THE BALL: Jenna Fischer is leaving The Office for Quebec -- the movie, not the province. The Emmy-nominated actress stars opposite John C. Reilly and Seann William Scott in Quebec, a comedy about a French-Canadian (Reilly) feuding with Scott over a job promotion. It's due out next year.

"John's character is from Quebec and he moves to Chicago where he ends up competing for a job with Seann's character," says Fischer, who plays Scott's wife.

"And Seann thinks there must be something about people from Quebec that's making this guy one-up him for these jobs. He becomes obsessed with Quebec."

Apparently, the producers may be fearing audiences won't be quite as enthralled with Quebec as Scott's character is. They're reportedly mulling a title change.