Quotes from Tom Hooper

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.