Director Stephen Daldry says his latest film, The Hours, may centre around the lives of three women but he insists that the female focus doesn't make it a chick flick.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham, The Hours intertwines the stories of Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) and two women who read her book Mrs. Dalloway.

First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway tells the story of a day in the life of an upper-class British woman as she prepares to throw a party and reflects on her life's choices. In The Hours, a pregnant 1950s house wife (Julianne Moore) and a modern-day book editor (Meryl Streep), both of whom are in the middle of reading the book, consider their own decisions.

"There is somewhere, particularly in the Clarissa (Streep) story, an idea that ... as you grow up, there is a level at which you accumulate grief of one sort or another -- I mean, grief about your own situation and what you haven't got, what you've lost, what's you've missed," Daldry told Canada AM's Seamus O'Regan.  

Daldry says that theme is seen "particularly in the character that Meryl Streep plays. Here again you have a woman in a bourgeois contemporary context, and again -- successful job, got a nice lover, a daughter that loves her ... Everything should be okay. But she's got an old lover that she cares for deeply and has been caring for but somehow her life is not flowering."

The combination of literary drama and gloomy, female-centred themes aren't likely to draw the same male numbers as the latest James Bond and Star Trek installments, but Daldry says the themes The Hours tackles are universal.

"I don't think the issues are ones men can't relate to," says Daldry, who was nominated for an Oscar for directing the 2000 hit Billy Elliot.

"I don't think this is a chick flick at all. I think there are real serious issues about how we live our lives and change our lives that are relevant to everybody."

In particular, Daldry says those themes were relevant to one of the film's stars -- Nicole Kidman, who had just split from Tom Cruise when shooting began on the movie.

"It was like a release, I think, for Nicole -- that she could find this extraordinary performance within."

Daldry says Kidman was "particularly fragile" when The Hours was made.

"She herself says Virginia came along at just the right time for her. In some way, exploring a whole variety and a whole range of emotional issues (was) actually very cathartic for the experience that she was actually going through."