Dakota Fanning, who turns 15 next week, is 'brilliant' at playing a boozed-up teenage clairvoyant on the run in Hong Kong in director Paul McGuigan's Push.

LOS ANGELES -- They grow up so fast. One movie, Dakota Fanning is scolding The Cat In The Hat, the next, she's a sick-to-her-stomach drunk in a Blade Runner-esque superhero movie called Push.

As Cassie, a teenage clairvoyant on the run in Hong Kong from sinister U.S. government forces, she decides to take a tip from her similarly-gifted mother, who'd told her alcohol makes her visions clearer, and downs a fifth of some Chinese whiskey.

No, Fanning -- who turns 15 next week -- says she has never had that experience. "I just did it. I didn't even know what I was going to do until I did it," Fanning says.

Both Chris Evans (who plays Nick, her telekinetic fugitive-partner) and director Paul McGuigan jokingly claim to have been her "drunk consultants."

"I'm pretty sure she's never been on a bender, but she had a Scottish director who's been on a few," says McGuigan with a laugh.

"That was one of my favourite scenes in the movie," McGuigan says, "just because it's the funniest scene, seeing Dakota Fanning drunk. But she was brilliant at it."

The end of childhood is a daunting thing to most child actors (see Culkin, Macaulay), but Fanning gets excited talking about this stage in her life.

"I went from this movie to The Secret Life Of Bees (in which she played a guilt-ridden teen with an abusive father), which was completely different," she says. "Which is an example of, like, how much fun I'm having these days. As you get older, there are so many more roles, so many wonderful stories. I get to be all kinds of different people. It's so exciting."

Next up, pending final negotiations and the staving off of a Screen Actors Guild strike, a role in New Moon, the sequel to the teen vampire soaper Twilight (she'd play the vampire Jane), a role she says would be "really, really cool."

Push -- which was shot low-budget on-the-fly in Hong Kong -- took her farthest from home of any movie.

"It was fun being somewhere so far from home. It was a culture shock, but in a good way. My mom was with me, and my dad came to visit for a while. The funny thing is my sister (Elle Fanning) was in Budapest with my grandmother filming (Nutcracker -- The Untold Story). So my dad was home alone for a few months."

The bad part of filming halfway around the world: The food.

"The thing was, we had a Cantonese crew, and the catering was geared toward them, which is great, they're the hardest-working people on the set." But she says she was kept alive by the Pizza Express and Nobu sushi franchise at her hotel.

The good part was the anonymity. "No one really recognized me there at all," Fanning says. "It was a very different experience."

Adds Evans: "They didn't really choose to be interacted with. It's very chaotic, very busy, very hustle-and-bustle, and they're not going to close the streets for you. So we'd hide a camera behind a bus, and Dakota and I were just walking through the street and they couldn't care less, bumping into you, like, get out of their way."

And she earned her action-film stripes taking shrapnel in a pyro scene at a Hong Kong fish market. In the scene, Cassie and Nick are being chased by the "Pop Boys," local Chinese "bleeders" who can break glass and make ears bleed with the sound of their voices, with fish tanks blowing up all around them.

"One of those fish tanks exploded and there was plastic on the tank, and we finished the take. Dakota is as white as a tablecloth, she takes off her jacket and all down her arm she had these pieces of plastic that had ripped right through her jacket. But she finished the take."

"It was a little, y'know, whatever," Fanning says, dismissing the extent of her injuries. "The fish market scene, you see me grab my arm. It's in the movie."

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