Quotes By Tom Hooper

I don't even like football.

Sometimes your body language is enough for an actor to know that you're not happy. And you don't really need to say it out loud if you deal with actors you know very well. And I don't think you really need to be explicit.

I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word 'lavish' and everything being magnificent.

I decided to be a filmmaker when I was 12. I had utter clarity that this would be my life.

If you look at classic Hollywood films, they tend to shoot close-ups on quite long lenses and the background it out of focus. You know, it's just a mush.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.

I mean, we've all had those dreams where, you know, we try to cry out and our voice won't come.

I appear to be drawn to iconic characters and what they reflect back to our cultures.

The hardest part of directing is the choosing. Unlike an actor who can do a variety of work, it is a year of your life, you can't afford to get it wrong.

Actors enjoy being treated as ordinary people.

I would say L.A. is more polite than London - it's a very careful place. People talk a lot in code.

The thing that fascinates me is that the way I came to film and television is extinct. Then there were gatekeepers, it was prohibitively expensive to make a film, to be a director you had to be an entrepreneur to raise money.

I think people enjoy finding out something genuinely new.

The more and more I work with really great actors, the more it's about opening yourself up to what they bring.

My two great loves when I'm shooting are working with great actors and composing images.

Some of my most special shooting experiences have been at weekends.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

I feel connected to the Second World War because my father lost his father in that war. So, through my dad and the effect it had on him of losing his father young, I always felt connected to the war. It goes back years, but it still feels to me as if we're completely living in it.

I come from the kind of family where work is work; my parents always taught me that it's better to be doing something than sitting around doing nothing.

I began to think that if you're a stutterer, it's about inhabiting silence, emptiness, and nothingness.

I have a yearning someday to do one of these huge juggernauts.

The more uncompromisingly specific you are the more you end up touching the bigger universal truths.

Some films clearly seem to divide people. And I do think there's something incredibly exciting about the commonality of us as human beings, which some films are lucky enough to tap into.

In 'The King's Speech,' patriotism is utterly contained within a historical moment, the third of September, 1939, where the aggressor is clear, the fight is clear, it hasn't become complicated over time.

A lot of dramas get a bad name commercially because they are unremittingly bleak.

When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.

Actors are programmed to see the worst. If you're talking about an actor's TV series, you say, 'I loved you last night.' And they go, 'What about the week before?' They immediately worry.

With the coming of radio as a mass medium, suddenly the world changed. It became about, 'Can this leader project emotional connection through the way he speaks on the radio?' And the anxiety about whether he could do that, we've inherited.

After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast and the airfield.

I'm the son of highly functioning parents who I'm incredibly lucky to have.