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
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.
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 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.
The more uncompromisingly specific you are the more you end up touching the bigger universal truths.
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.
I have a yearning someday to do one of these huge juggernauts.
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.
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.'
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.
I think the thumb print on the throat of many people is childhood trauma that goes unprocessed and unrecognized.
I mean, we've all had those dreams where, you know, we try to cry out and our voice won't come.
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 would say L.A. is more polite than London - it's a very careful place. People talk a lot in code.
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.
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 Shakespeare's history plays, what the setting of monarchy allows is this extraordinary intensification of emotions and predicament.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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 English film is very embarrassed by patriotism, generally.
I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word 'lavish' and everything being magnificent.
I appear to be drawn to iconic characters and what they reflect back to our cultures.
American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture.
American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.
I find that after a screening, people really want to come and tell you what they feel.
I began to think that if you're a stutterer, it's about inhabiting silence, emptiness, and nothingness.
My two great loves when I'm shooting are working with great actors and composing images.
I think people enjoy finding out something genuinely new.
A lot of dramas get a bad name commercially because they are unremittingly bleak.
I don't even like football.
My films seem to be about men's struggle with failure.
Some of my most special shooting experiences have been at weekends.
Actors enjoy being treated as ordinary people.
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'm the son of highly functioning parents who I'm incredibly lucky to have.
What's fascinating about the Australians is they have this quality that they are impervious to majesty. They're not awed.
The more and more I work with really great actors, the more it's about opening yourself up to what they bring.
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.
