Rosario Dawson brings characteristic sass and style to her role as a tough-as-nails damsel in distress in Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

Over a career defined by left turns and atypical performances, Rosario Dawson has literally grown up on screen. Kicking off as a heartbreakingly troubled adolescent (Larry Clark's Kids), she then played a resentful high school sweetheart (Spike Lee's He Got Game), the young wife of a world changing figure (Oliver Stone's epic Alexander), a prostitute/enforcer supreme (Robert Rodriguez's Sin City and upcoming Sin City 2) and finally a legitimate screen-sharing co-star (Kevin Smith's stoner comedy Clerks II). Meanwhile, she stole scenes in films as good as Spike Lee's 25th Hour and Dito Montiel's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, and as bad as Pluto Nash and Josie and the Pussycats, ingratiating herself with the business' best directors in the process.

"It's not so much calculated as it is natural that we seek each other out," Dawson explains as to why she keeps turning up at award winners' shoots. "I've worked with Spike twice; I've worked with Ed Burns twice [Sidewalks of New York, Ash Wednesday]; I'd love to work with Kevin Smith again; I'd love to work with Dito again..." Clearly, however, there is something in her that keeps bringing the directors, producers, casting agents and financiers back- something beyond mere providence. "It's just really lucky and great when you get to find each other. We work together and realise that we're both doing it from the same place," she claims, without pride. "I like working with people who are passionate. We do it to leave something great behind; it's important to be a part of that, and to find people who are likeminded."

Australian audiences will finally get a chance to view Dawson's work in Quentin Tarantino's car crash thriller Death Proof. In what is now becoming a familiar explanation, the film was originally screened in America alongside Robert Rodriguez's zombie flick Planet Terror in a double bill salute to exploitation cinema called Grindhouse. But tepid treatment by American punters led to the death of that dream overseas, and Australian audiences will instead get an extended "festival length" version of the Tarantino piece, leaving Rodriguez's expertly crafted and darkly hilarious half of the bill in limbo.

Dawson's role in the film is relatively limited, if consequential. "Within Death Proof, there are two halves," she explains. "I'm in the latter half with Zoe Bell- who was Uma Thurman's stunt girl in Kill Bill- and Tracy Thoms. I play a hair and makeup artist on a film shoot, and we become targets of Stuntman Mike, and 'dum, dum, dum... do we make it, or do we not?'" Far more than simple fodder for the slasher mill, Dawson is at the forefront of the director's "girls first" ethos, and is capable of standing toe-to-toe with the baddest of the bad boys: Kurt Russell's Stuntman Mike.

Russell is Tarantino's ultimate crim here, a marked departure from the brilliantly flawed antiheroes that have populated his previous offerings. "It's almost something that could really happen!" Dawson maintains. "Unlike Planet Terror, there are no lab explosions or zombies or anything weird like that. It's just a guy in a car who likes to crash into women and kill them. He's built a cage into his car, and he can hit anything at 100 miles per hour and walk away unscathed. That's just how he gets off. Oh, and Mickey... er... Kurt Russell calls the car 'Death Proof'." Dawson laughs through her Freudian slip. It is now common knowledge that madman actor Mickey Rourke, on whom Tarantino has a long-standing director crush (Rourke reportedly turned down the part of Butch, eventually played by Bruce Willis, in Pulp Fiction), fell out of the production over an undisclosed dispute.

Even more impressive for Dawson than the role itself was her director. "Quentin is just remarkable. I really, really love him a lot, and he's so much the epitome of that ideal that says, 'I'm going out there with great passion and love'. Robert and Quentin have made themselves huge celebrities. People are going to see Sin City 2 and Death Proof because of the directors, and that's very unusual," she claims. "Quentin hasn't even done that many movies- this is only his fifth film- but he has that attraction. It's more than any other kind of star power, because it comes from his integrity and what he makes, which is really remarkable. He's famous because of his original ideas, and because his executions are so inspiring."

Death Proof is released in cinemas on November 1.