Tom Hooper

“I don't even like football.”

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

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

“If you look at Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“What's fascinating about the Australians is they have this quality that they are impervious to majesty. They're not awed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

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

“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 think people enjoy finding out something genuinely new.”

“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.”

“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.”

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