Quotes By Tom Hooper

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

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

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

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 don't even like football.

I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word 'lavish' and everything being magnificent.

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

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

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

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

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.

Actors enjoy being treated as ordinary people.

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

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

I think people enjoy finding out something genuinely new.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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'.