Five minutes into a conversation with Oscar-nominated actress Julianne Moore and right away, you know she is everything you’ve imagined her to be: Warm, smart, elegant, no-nonsense and so gorgeously real.

She’s also one of Hollywood’s most versatile and hardworking actresses, whose talent for portraying honest, real, flawed women wasn’t duly recognised until she was in her 30s, in movies such as Boogie Nights and The End Of The Affair. Her mainstream stardom was cemented during her 40s, (Far From Heaven, The Hours, Hannibal); and even now, at 52, Moore continues to impress on both the big screen and small.

And you believe her when she raves about her teenage co-star, Chloe Grace Moretz. The 16-year-old has been a big surprise, a bonafide “Hit-Girl”, if you will. Moretz has had a string of highly-praised performances in a growing list of movies that includes Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Matt Reeve’s Let Me In and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. But she’s surprisingly nothing like what you’d expect; with no self-entitled bratty young Hollywood teen-actress-of-the-moment airs.

The pair star in Carrie, director Kimberly Peirce’s re-imagining of the classic horror tale by Stephen King, which made celluloid history when Brian De Palma brought it to the silver screen in 1976. Moretz steps into the title role made iconic by Sissy Spacek, while Moore takes over the reins from Piper Laurie as Carrie’s overprotective, fanatically religious and abusive mother.

BONDING MOMENTS

“She’s a really good girl. She’s a lot of fun. She was 15 when we shot (Carrie) and she’s very professional, really talented, very engaging and wants to do well and great work,” Moore said about Moretz. “I love her and I loved being with her. She’s incredibly mature, but she is still a teenager. I always remind her I know how old she really is, and that I have experience with people that age — my son is just six months younger than Chloe.”

“And like a foot taller than me,” interjected Moretz.

“Yeah. Maybe she’ll marry him, someday. Who knows?” Moore grinned.

“Oh, my gosh! She’s already marrying me off to her son!”

Moore answered without missing a beat. “And then I’d be your mother-in-law.”

The chemistry between the two actresses is palpable, and the gushing goes both ways. It is obvious that Moretz is completely enamoured of Moore.

“I had already been such a huge fan of Julianne and being a young actor, she was someone I looked up to for many reasons,” said Moretz. “She is an incredibly strong woman and she has always influenced female actors by just being very strong, and really not saying ‘no’ to anything and kind of taking everything by the horns.

“She’s just the nicest, most amazing personal person and we just completely bonded over the stupidest of things, you know?”

Like discussing what’s going through their heads in between takes. “I asked her during one of the scenes, ‘What are you thinking about right now while you’re dead?’ She was like, ‘I’m trying to figure out what wallpaper we’re going to put on this room’. And I was like, oh, my God!” laughed Moretz.

“Oh, sometimes I think about lunch,” Moore piped in. “I like to think about lunch.”

“Always talking about salads and bean sprout things,” added Moretz.

This ease and bonding between the pair is the result of the two actresses feeling comfortable with each other and the subject matter they had to deal with.

“I think that the most important thing in a relationship is to be comfortable with the person you’re working with and to make them feel safe with you,” Moore said. “And I think, particularly when you’re dealing with somebody who is still a child, it’s very imperative that they be comfortable and feel safe. And I think in this movie, in particular, (it was more important) because it was so extreme. So, I think we felt really comfortable with one another and that was important.

“We worked very hard on making that relationship as authentic as possible and as connected as possible so that within the realm of this horrific behaviour, you hope there’s a genuine bond and, because I felt the way I did about Chloe, it was very easy to do.”

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Both actresses also felt strongly about the film’s main topic: Bullying.

“One of Kim Peirce’s main things with the script was bringing in the social media aspect. Her reason was, nowadays the way of bullying is not going up to someone and just shoving them into the locker — it’s going to the Internet and making fake personalities and tricking them and it’s much more manipulative,” said Moretz.

One scene that shows this cyber bullying is the one where Carrie gets her period in the shower and all the other girls pull out their mobile phones and record it.“By the end of the movie, there’s this horrific moment when the blood drops and ... it’s not her choice. The telekinetic powers don’t just take over her the minute the blood drops. She wants to leave. It’s what they do and what they show that makes her stay and makes her switch. So again, it’s like the social media aspect of it really does enhance it and makes it very relevant to what’s going on (in real life).

“That’s why, when you watch this movie, it shows you that something this little can happen in such a little town, but it kind of shows you the bigger aspect of it.”

For Moore, the dangerous fact is that “so much of social media seems to be anonymous”. “When I was in junior high, we had those slam books that went around and you could comment anonymously about each other,” she recalled. “They were eventually confiscated and were considered illegal. And now, culturally, we have it occurring legally in social media and on the Internet. With grown-ups — it’s not just with kids! And even on the gossip sites, people write comments anonymously.

“It’s absolutely reprehensible,” she added. “I think you should be able to say whatever you want to say, but you should never say it anonymously. That would change things tremendously.”

Is it important to remake a movie like Carrie a cautionary tale? “I think it makes everybody think. You know movies always reflect culture. They don’t determine culture. Obviously what we write about and what we watch are things that are happening in our own world. And Carrie is a great piece of literature — it really is,” said Moore.

“It’s a great story that speaks to a lot of people, where people have tremendous identification with one or many of the characters. I think it’s a theme that comes up again and again, you know? Who do we leave out in our society and why? And what is the effect of that?”

That’s when Moretz looks at Moore in awe and that bonding surfaces once again. “Oh God, that’s a great answer. Every single one!”