TOM HOOPER

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Actors enjoy being treated as ordinary people.

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

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

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.

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'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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.