HOLLYWOOD -- Dominique Swain is all knees and knuckles and ums and ahs.

She squirms in her orange silk designer minidress, wrings her hands, cracks her finger joints, covers her face, grimaces, frowns, giggles, stretches her legs, lolls her delicate head so that her strawberry-blonde Heidi-style braid dips from side to side.

Her body language isn't merely sending a message -- it's issuing an S.O.S.

The coltish bundle of physical tics before me is, after all, merely 18. Sharing a stage with the internationally famous does not yet feel like business as usual.

The star of the new Lolita is here to play meet-the-press along with co-star Jeremy Irons, director Adrian Lyne and screenwriter Stephen Schiff.

Her nerves appear to be winning.

What does she believe to be the essence of Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel about a man's sexual obsession with his 14-year-old stepdaughter? This movie version of it was made when Dominique was herself only 15 and is being released in Toronto Friday, only now after a long fight for distribution.

"O-h-h-h, G-a-a-a-w-d," she answers, twisting her lithe frame like a human knot, then asks for more time to consider the question and passes the podium back to her elders.

Separated from the pack after the press conference, Dominique is, relatively speaking, more relaxed, but still twitchy.

"I think that kind of carries over from my awkwardness in real life. I'm trying to figure out the space that my body is taking up and I'm just a little bit clumsy," she says, laughing and rolling her eyes.

She's also ready to try that question. But first to explain why she passed before. "I just don't have an opinion about everything, so I don't want to just blurt it out when it's not my business.

"Or when it's not going to be conducive to the message" -- she punches the air in a gung-ho motion -- "that we want to portray."

The message, as expressed earlier by screenwriter Schiff, was of Humbert Humbert and pubescent stepdaughter Lolita as "a very sort of misbegotten couple" and the film as "a romantic love story."

Dominique will have none of it.

"Humbert Humbert was a sicko," she says.

When it came time to film the sicker scenes, her mother was never far away, half of a two-pronged plan to protect the teen from corruption on the Lolita set. The other was The Pad, a cushion slipped between her and Irons during intimate sequences.

Her designated protective parent today is her father, David, a low-key guy with a grey ponytail who stands a few feet away and keeps a low profile until invited to do otherwise.

"I'm an engineer. Far from all this stuff. But I love it. I love to see the accomplishment," he says.

He knows some people judge him to be a bad parent for even letting his 15-year-old child take the role.

"And I might have been," he agrees, as mellow as his Malibu address. "It could have been not a good experience for her. I was naive going into it. I wanted to do something for Dominique that would be something she wanted, to support her.

"That's where I was coming from then, more than I was looking out for her really. I'm just glad it worked out well."

Dominique is the fourth of five children, all girls but one, and all accomplished in academics, the arts or athletics. She swims, runs on her high school cross-country team and sculpts fairies.

"I just felt that I have a big family, and I had to go out of my way to get noticed," she says of her turn towards acting.

She got director Lyne's attention, and the advantage over 2,500 aspiring actresses, by sending in a home video of herself reading from the novel.

On set, she found out what it would be like to be an only child -- and that it wasn't to her liking.

"I mean, any little thing was like applauded and supported and people would say, 'Oh yeah, do that again.' I just felt like, 'Ahhh, maybe I'm becoming a brat.' Every little action was so catered to."

When she heads to university in New York or L.A. next year, it will be to study film. Although she continued to act in the long wait for Lolita's release here, playing John Travolta's daughter in Face/Off and a teen infatuated with a rock star in the upcoming Girl, she's not sure she'll make it a lifelong habit.

"I don't really feel that at this point in my life I can say that my goal is to continue doing what I'm doing now," she says.

"I just don't think that that's a high enough aspiration."

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