Quotes By Tom Hooper

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

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.

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.

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.

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 think people enjoy finding out something genuinely new.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I think I would say 'The King's Speech' is surprisingly funny, in fact the audiences in London, Toronto, LA, New York commented there's more laughter in this film than in most comedies, while it is also a moving tear-jerker with an uplifting ending.

What I learned about stammering was that, when as a young child you lose the confidence of anyone who wants to listen to you, you lose confidence in your voice and the right to speech. And a lot of the therapy was saying, 'You have a right to be heard.'

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.

I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day.

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.

I think English film is very embarrassed by patriotism, generally.

My dad said, 'The thing that I was told that was really helpful was that I mustn't be afraid of the things I was afraid of when I was five years old'. The shock of his childhood had put him in this defensive crouch against the world, and he needed to know that he had a nice wife and kids and it wasn't the same any more.

I love the incredible variety of demands directing makes on you, from the entrepreneur to the hustler to the deal-maker to the writer; to directing actors and the camera and working with music, sound, marketing and promotion. It uses so many sides of your brain.

Well, I'm half Australian, half English and I live in London. That is the only reason I came upon this story. My Australian mother, Meredith Hooper, was invited in late 2007 by some Australian friends to make up a token Australian audience in a tiny fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called 'The King's Speech.'

I find that after a screening, people really want to come and tell you what they feel.