Emma Roberts standing on her own two feet

Just 19, but with a dozen movie credits to her name, she’s used to being in the spotlight, having grown up visiting her Aunt Julia — that would be Julia Roberts; her dad is Julia’s brother, actor Eric Roberts — on various film sets.

She and fellow cast members were in Toronto in September for the TIFF premiere of It’s Kind Of A Funny Story, a comedy opening today about a 16-year-old Craig (Toronto’s Keir Gilchrist) who ends up in a Brooklyn psychiatric ward after contemplating suicide. Roberts was rocking sky-high heels and a teeny-tiny miniskirt as she talked about her latest role while nibbling toast with jam in a Yorkville hotel room.

She also plays a troubled teen in the movie. Like Craig, Noelle has been shunted off to the adult facility due to administrative problems elsewhere. Smart and funny, she bears the scars of her illness — she’s been here before — and Craig is fascinated with her. Meanwhile, fellow patient Bobby (Zach Galifianakis) pretty much runs the place and helps Craig learn the ropes.

“She’s she is going through dark stuff, but that is so unbelievable to some people and yet she is worrying about if the boy thinks she’s pretty, which to me just shows that it doesn’t matter how old you are or where you are in the world, you know you wanted to be loved,” says Roberts. “That’s really sweet and showed that she was a 16-year-old girl despite her trying to be older and despite her problems.”

The movie is based on Ned Vizzini’s 2006 novel, inspired by his own brief hospitalization for depression.

“I loved making it,” Roberts says of the film. “It was based on one of my favourite books, so to get to be a part of it, to get to be a part of something that I loved reading, it’s really special to me. And I got to meet the author Ned Vizzini, who is so nice and really complimentary; he was just so enthusiastic about the film.”

She adds she feared when Vizzini visited the set, he would be protective of his work and not approve of the screenplay, written by the film’s directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

“You know he’s so sweet and very introverted but then when he talks it’s very enthusiastic he’s not intimidating at all. He is just really approachable,” says Roberts. “Anything that we threw at him he was just like, ‘Amazing! Oh my God! You look great! It looks great! I love it!’ So that made my really happy.”

She also found the character of Noelle very true to a 16-year-old’s perspective.

“I just really clicked with the character,” Roberts says. “She would come in and be really funny and she would be very vague and then she’d be very vulnerable and then be very mean, so to me it was really an honest depiction of what it’s like to be 16.”

Roberts, who starred in younger fare like Nancy Drew and Hotel for Dogs, is enjoying playing young adult-teen roles and she’s very busy at it. She had a second film at TIFF, co-starring with Jennifer Connelly and Ed Harris in What’s Wrong with Virginia and just wrapped on Scream 4 (where she says she burst a blood vessel in her eye with her enthusiastic shrieks of horror) and the teen romance, Homework, with Freddie Highmore.

And then there was her small role in February’s Valentine’s Day, which starred Aunt Julia Roberts and a huge all-star cast.

So has she gotten any advice from her family members?