Tom Hooper

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

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

“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.”

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

“Actors enjoy being treated as ordinary people.”

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

“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'.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“My films seem to be about men's struggle with failure.”

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

“I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized.”

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

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