"Map" is set up at Spain's Mediapro, which has just announced three films with Woody Allen.

The drama will be shot in Tokyo, half in English, half in Japanese.

"Map" turns on "an obsessed man who collects sounds and women," Coixet said.

It looks set to be Cruz's next film, she added.

Coixet's Japan-set film reflects the tenor of a career she describes as "exploration." Focusing on character-driven dramas that elicit strong perfs, the Barcelona-based Coixet shot "My Life Without Me" in the U.S. with Sarah Polley and "The Secret Life of Words" near the North Sea with Polly and Tim Robbins. So a Japan-set film is hardly a radical departure.

"I'm hugely lucky. I can make films all over the world," Coixet said.

"Elegy," an adaptation of Philip Roth's novel "The Dying Animal," is Coixet's first film with a U.S. company, Lakeshore Entertainment.

The biggest challenge presented by the pic was not working for a U.S. company -- "We had good fights and great dialogue," Coixet said -- but squeezing out any sympathy for David Kepesh, the aging culture critic of "Elegy" played Ben Kingsley, who "collects love affairs as a way of winning his battle against time," Coixet said.

But Coixet is behind the character. "I think Kepesh is an honest person. Philip Roth loves sex, he loves making love, and he never apologizes for that. That's very unusual in American art," she said.