Paper Towns Starring Nat Wolff and Cara Delevingne

Delevingne explains, “I was, like, fight and flight for months”. “I don’t think it’s just modeling, although I think it’s worse in modeling”.

The makers of Paper Towns would dearly love to emulate that success, whisking its stars around the world on an extensive global press tour in an attempt to get the word out.

Margo (Delevingne) and Quentin/Q (Nat Wolff) formed a bond as kids when her family moved across the street but throughout high school they have grown apart, much to his disappointment.

Delevingne claims she was a lot more self-conscious in her late teens than her on-screen alter ego, but they do share the same daring and sense of adventure.

Delevingne herself doesn’t find public perception of her a struggle or a burden to live up to – “my life isn’t hard” – but she does reckon it’s difficult to change focus, like she has, when you’re already in the spotlight: “If you do a film like this from nothing, no other experience, people aren’t really going to scrutinise you at all, or as much”.

Paper Towns was a pleasant surprise and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

One night a few weeks shy of graduation, Margot slips through Quentin’s bedroom window: she’s about to embark on a mischievous revenge spree, and she needs a getaway driver. I’ve talked to people from Adam Levine to Elton John, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s to carry yourself in a way you’d want to see yourself on TV later.

In so doing, what begins as a tale of unrequited romance spins off into a mystery that, when Quentin sets off with friends to the “paper town” he believes Margo has fled to, morphs again into a light-hearted road movie. “And if they see all the hype and that distracts from who I really am – then that’s good”. “Cara is just so spontaneous, alive and fascinating”, he gushes.

“I am a bit of a feminist and it makes me feel sick”, she said.

At 16, she says she came “very close” to being cast in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, but the role went to the Australian actress Mia Wasikowska. “You don’t even know me”.

A “paper town”, by the way, is a bogus hamlet placed on maps by cartographers to catch out plagiarists.

“I feel, though, that every time I start a new film it’s like starting a new life”.

Paper Towns is out in the UK on 17 August.