A fan of the director's perfectionism and the star's hair.

Sure, controversy surrounds the editing of 'Eyes Wide Shut.' (Were the steamy scenes between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman cut to snag an R rating?) But one thing is certain: 17-year-old Leelee Sobieski, who is featured in the film, doesn't censor herself. Without hesitation, she explains that, two years ago, while shooting Deep Impact, she developed a crush on her love interest in that movie, Elijah Wood. ("You have to play the emotions that you like somebody," she says, "and you end up liking them.") Ask her were she hails from, and she says, "I was born in New York; I was conceived in France."

Sobieski - whose French-born father, Jean, is a painter and American mother, Elizabeth, a writer - was discovered at age 10 in her Manhattan private-school cafeteria when a casting agent showed up looking for girls for Interview With The Vampire. She didn't land a part in that film, but she went on to enjoy a career in television. Her big screen breakthrough occurred in 1998 with Merchant-Ivory's A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. By then, she had finished working on Eyes Wide Shut.

"There weren't a lot of people on the set," says Sobieski of the shoot. "Everything got to be very personal and intimate." Indeed, Kubrick joined the long list of Sobieski's co-worker's who have contributed a lock of hair to her unique collection, which she keeps sorted in a box in her room. She has clipped samples from Peter O'Toole and Maximilian Schell (her co-stars in the CBS miniseries Joan of Arc) as well as from Drew Barrymore (her co-star in Never Been Kissed). Unfortunately, she failed to land one big donor. "When I asked Tom Cruise for it," she says, "his hair was short, and it's hard to take a tiny piece of hair out without it being noticeable. He was gonna send it to me at the end of the film - but, you know, two years later, I guess you forget."