“An Education” star Carey Mulligan is in negotiations to climb into the passenger seat of the action thriller “Drive,” which already has Ryan Gosling at the wheel. “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston is also negotiating to join the cast.

Nicolas Winding Refn (“Bronson”) is directing the adaptation of the James Sallis novel about a nameless Hollywood stuntman (Gosling) who moonlights as a freelance getaway driver during robberies. When a bank heist goes wrong, he ends up on the run with a contract on his head and an ex-con’s girlfriend (Mulligan) in his car.

OddLot Entertainment, Bold Films and Marc Platt Prods. are producing the project, which starts shooting around Los Angeles next month. Hossein Amini (“Killshot”) wrote the adapted screenplay. [CORRECTION: The project used to be set up at Universal but it is no longer at the studio. As of now, the movie has no domestic distributor; WME is repping the rights.]

Producers include Marc Platt, Gigi Pritzker, Michel Litvak, Adam Siegel and John Palermo. David Lancaster, Gary Michael Walters, Bill Lischak and Linda McDonough will serve as executive producers on the project.

OK, so you gather six actresses -- Patricia Clarkson, Mo'Nique, Robin Wright, Emily Blunt, Vera Farmiga and Carey Mulligan -- around a table and start peppering them with questions about the craft. How soon before one of them starts faking an orgasm? Not long, if you ask the right question. In this case, it was: "What's the toughest scene for an actress?" A pause. Wright: "Umm... orgasming." Clarkson to Mo'Nique: "She would find it a playground." Enter Mo'Nique... You have to love an actress who demands that the crew stay in the room for the big moment: "I was a kid! I was like, 'I can do this in front of everybody?!" The "Precious" actress has been stirring up awards chatter for her portrayal of a cruel and abusive mother in the Lee Daniels film. But her moment at THR's awards round table showed her on-screen commitment to pleasure, as well. "What we do, we go to fantasy," she says of acting, by way of explanation. You're probably not the only one, Moan'ique.

"An Education" director Lone Scherfig recently lamented, good-naturedly, that she was tired of producers thinking of her for stereotypically female projects. "Everyone sends me scripts with these sweet stories," she said. "I've done that already. I want to make a movie with chases and explosions. I want to blow things up." Scherfig might have a point about typecasting, but she also might consider herself lucky -- at least she's in a category in which women are finally getting their due. This awards season couldn't be a happier time for female helmers -- as many as three (Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion and Scherfig) could be nominated for best director. That would equal the total number of women nominated -- can this be? -- in the 73-year history of the award (Sofia Coppola, Lina Wertmuller and Campion, if you're playing Trivial Pursuit). And yet a look at a category specifically designed for women shows a different picture. In the best actress field, there's a single Oscar perennial (Meryl Streep, for "Julie & Julia"), some buzzed-about newcomers (Carey Mulligan and Gabourey Sidibe for "An Education" and "Precious," respectively) and ... that's pretty much it .

The Carey Mulligan express rolled on at the New York premiere of "An Education" on Monday night at a pleasantly low-key event at the city's Brasserie 8 1/2 restaurant in midtown. At this stage of the race, Mulligan -- who brought a few friends along from the Gotham set of "Wall Street 2," helmer Oliver Stone and star Shia LaBeouf (both sat quietly at a table chatting with each other alongside Stone's nonagenarian mother) -- is considered not only a front-runner for a best actress nom, but a pretty strong candidate to win the big prize.

Many of the people associated with the pic turned out, including producer Jim Stern and screenwriter Nick Hornby, who this time around was adapting a book he didn't write instead of having a book he did write adapted by someone else. "It made me a lot more aware of keeping in touch with the author (the memoirist Lynn Barber) because I know what it's like to have a screenwriter take a book and disappear for a few years," said Hornby, the author of the books that became "High Fidelity," "About a Boy" and "Fever Pitch," in a comment we suspect may contain as much truth as comedy.

How much "Education," a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl in 1960's London who falls for a man twice her age (Peter Sarsgaard, looking bearded and hirsute at the premiere), can compete in categories beyond best actress remains an open question.