"Birth," like "Eyes Wide Shut," revels in its mysteries. Even after the young boy's story has been mostly debunked as a hoax, a few lingering questions remain. And Kidman loves that ambiguity because, as she often likes to say, "None of us knows anything."

Which makes me think about mortality and the film's contemplation on the supernatural.

"How are you feeling about the afterlife these days?" I ask her.

"I'm open to ideas and I change and shift and grow," Kidman says. "There are times when I feel solid in my strength of who and where I am. And there are other times when I go, 'Ooof, everything's been removed and everything feels very tenuous and I'm not quite sure what's what.' And that has to do with having lost people very suddenly. I think that leaves you unsteady. As much as we're all presenting ideas, none of us has the definitive power to know what's going on."

Kidman lost her father a decade ago after he suffered a heart attack, and he comes up often in our conversations. Grief isn't finite. We talk about how we'd like to believe we might see our loved ones in another realm.

"I can feel him," Kidman says. "So I'm very open to that. We just don't know." She pauses and then laughs. "But I guess we'll all find out someday, won't we?"

"Birth" premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2004. Reviews were mixed and when the movie opened the following month, audiences mostly stayed away. Today, it holds a firm place alongside the three other movies Glazer has made — "Sexy Beast," "Under the Skin" and "The Zone of Interest," which won the international feature Oscar earlier this year — with Kidman's performance now considered one of the best in a career full of superlative work.

"Movies that deal with uncomfortable subject matter will rarely be rapturously received because you're dealing with things that don't make people feel safe," Kidman says. "They're not a soothing bath."

"Yes," I agree, "and you've made a lot of movies that —"

"— are not soothing baths," Kidman replies, finishing the thought, laughing. "They're not lullabies."

How does Glazer himself feel about "Birth" two decades on?

"I haven't seen it since we made it," he says. "But I do know it's a film some people deeply connect with and that's a gratifying feeling."

As part of her AFI gala, Kidman sat for a pretaped interview discussing the entirety of her career. How did she feel after making that time-machine journey?

"I felt sadness and wonder," Kidman says. "Definitely wonder. Like: How?"

She bursts into a goofy laugh. "How did this happen? So much of it is great memories. My mother said in her wedding speech — my second wedding — that Nicole's always looked at the world through rose-colored glasses, particularly the past." Kidman pauses, smiling. "I thought that was kind of nice."

So where does the sadness part come in?

"The sadness is, 'Aaaaw, I want to be able to do it all again.'"

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(Glenn Whipp covers film and television for the Los Angeles Times and serves as columnist for The Envelope, The Times’ awards season publication.)

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