Director David Cronenberg, left, and actor Julianne Moore laugh during a press conference for "Maps to the Stars" at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Hannah Yoon

TORONTO - Four-time Oscar nominee Julianne Moore knows the anguish her character in the new film "Maps to the Stars" goes through as she campaigns hard for a certain role and doesn't get it.

"My manager was saying last night, who I've been with for ages, she's like: 'Oh my gosh, I feel like I've given that speech about, "Don't worry, sweetheart, you didn't get this one, but you're going to get the next one and there's something better on the horizon,"' and I remember her giving that to me a million times," she said in an interview at September's Toronto International Film Festival.

But unlike her character, Moore has not found that being over the age of 40 has resulted in fewer and fewer roles.

"It's been OK for me," the 53-year-old said with a laugh. "I think the issue with female roles has always been whether or not that role is central to the story, and that happens when women are younger, when we're older. It's like, 'Where are the female-dominated stories?' I actually think that that's more pertinent than the age thing because you hear actresses kind of all along saying, 'I don't want to play the girlfriend. I don't want to play the wife.' You don't want to play an ancillary character. That's not how I'm experiencing my life.

"Every woman I know is at the centre of her own story, so I think you want to see films that reflect that. ... There are days when I do things and I see virtually only women, just because of where I am and what I'm doing with my children, where I go to my yoga class. I think, 'Well, the majority of the people I'm dealing with on a day-to-day basis are women.'"

Moore won a best actress trophy at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in "Maps to the Stars," which hits theatres on Friday. She plays Havana, a fading, youth-obsessed actress who desperately tries to get the lead in a remake of a film that earned her late actress-mother (Sarah Gadon) an Oscar nomination.

Havana is reminiscent of some actresses but isn't based on anyone in particular, said Moore. "She's everybody and she's nobody. She's the worst part of all of us. She's the neediest, most unquenchable part of everybody I've ever known, except she was a person who didn't grow up and wasn't socialized out of it, so she's pathologically so."

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg directed the star-packed cast, which also includes Mia Wasikowska as Agatha, the disturbed daughter of a celebrity self-help guru (John Cusack) in Tinseltown.

Olivia Williams plays her mom, who manages the career of Agatha's bratty child-star brother (Evan Bird). Robert Pattinson plays a limousine driver/wannabe actor and Carrie Fisher plays a version of herself.

"The common question I get asked is, 'Have you always been wanting to attack Hollywood?' and I say, 'No, I have no bones to pick with Hollywood. Hollywood doesn't owe me anything and I've never had a bad experience there,'" Cronenberg said in a recent interview in Toronto.

"What attracted me to the script was basically its universality. It's about greed and ambition and vulnerability and power and the need to construct an identity, and desperation and all of those things set within a couple of families."

Writer Bruce Wagner started penning the satirical drama 20 years ago, getting inspiration from his own experience as a struggling actor/writer who drove limos.

Cronenberg said they updated the script "constantly" as they tried to get the film made over the past decade. The advent of social media added a poignancy to one of the film's major themes — the need for validation.

"Everybody feels like a star, everybody is a celebrity, and there you see the sort of desperation for an identity, to create an identity, to be somebody in the world who counts," he said.

"Maps to the Stars" was the first time Cronenberg filmed a feature in the U.S. He said he hadn't done so before in his more than four-decade career because it was a matter of money.

"When the Canadian dollar was 73 cents all those many years ago, no American wanted to shoot in America. They wanted to shoot in Canada because the dollar was cheaper and they could get more bang for their buck. And then after that it was the tax breaks that we were getting in Ontario and so on were better than the U.S."

He shot some of the film over five days in Los Angeles, at landmarks including the Hollywood sign and Rodeo Drive. The rest was shot in Toronto.

"It was very cathartic to finally get to shoot not just in America but in Hollywood, and not just in Hollywood but at all the iconic spots," said Cronenberg. "It was necessitated by the script and in fact that was one of the things that held us up from getting the movie made for so many years."

Cronenberg said his American crew members were also excited by shooting there, "because nobody is shooting feature films in Hollywood. It's too expensive and they don't get the tax breaks there. Even though they had an actor for a long time as their governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, they never could match the tax breaks that you could get in Ontario or for that matter Louisiana or even New York."

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News from © The Canadian Press, 2014