I decided to be a filmmaker when I was 12. I had utter clarity that this would be my life. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
The more uncompromisingly specific you are the more you end up touching the bigger universal truths. – Tom Hooper
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.’ – Tom Hooper
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.’ – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
If you look at Shakespeare’s history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament. – Tom Hooper
I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word ‘lavish’ and everything being magnificent. – Tom Hooper
I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
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’. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
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. – Tom Hooper
What’s fascinating about the Australians is they have this quality that they are impervious to majesty. They’re not awed. – Tom Hooper
