Late last week Academy executive producers Lizie Gower and Nick Morris closed the deal on their first Hollywood venture, shoring up the funding for Jonathan Glazer's follow-up to Sexy Beast with Fine Line Cinema.

The dramatic mystery will be called Birth. Producers are in advanced negotiations with Nicole Kidman to take the starring role of a mid-thirties Upper East Side New Yorker seduced by a 10-year old whom she is convinced is the reincarnation of her dead husband. The plot has her reassessing her past and questioning her choices to the consternation of her fiance and family.

Sam Sneade is lined up to edit, Peter Raeburn will be music supervisor.

The script was written by Glazer with Jean Claude Carriere (credits include 1967's Belle De Jour, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Cyrano De Bergerac).

Lizie Gower told shots.net that after raising the funding she was simply "looking forward to going to bed and getting a life back after dealing with LA and New Zealand until 2 or 3 am" and described the process for Morris and herself as "the steepest learning curve of our careers so far."

The team sent scripts to studios in mid-September, so the fact that the money has been sewn up by early October goes some way to indicate how bankable a talent Hollywood considers Glazer.

The film will shoot in January in New York. "We insisted on shooting in New York rather than going to Toronto. There would have been financial savings but it would have been at a creative cost," said Gower.

"It's rewarding," she continued. "We set up our features division two years ago and now it feels like a real operation, one which I think our directors really appreciate having on their own doorstep." As well as the Glazer flick, Academy has scripts for Peter Cattaneo and Frederic Planchon in development.

Jean-Louis Piel, executive producer on Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book and a producer on Larry Clark's forthcoming Ken Park, will share producing responsibility on Birth with Gower and Morris, who will continue to run the commercials business in London.

Fine Line produced notable successes such as the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, but have less grand associations within the commercials arena considering the fight between Tony Kaye following the fall-out from American History X.