Top 35 Tom Hooper Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Tom Hooper

2. “I don’t even like football.”

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

4. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

5. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

6. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

7. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

8. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

9. “Great acting is all about being in the moment, being in the present tense.”

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

11. “Trans stories have now entered the mainstream in this fantastic way, but the most important thing is what follows from that is hopefully a shift in the experience of trans people – so that there’s more acceptance in the culture to the issues they face and more support.”

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

14. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

15. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

16. “I was always obsessed with finding truly researched images to add authenticity, out of that came something totally contemporary and modern. Research is very key to my process because over and over again, reality provides more interesting images than you could have invented.”

— Tom Hooper

17. “A British villain never loses their sense of humour.”

— Tom Hooper

18. “I think people enjoy finding out something genuinely new.”

— Tom Hooper

19. “I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word ‘lavish’ and everything being magnificent.”

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

23. “I’m the son of highly functioning parents who I’m incredibly lucky to have.”

— Tom Hooper

24. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

25. “The irony of a director going to film festivals is you never get to see any of the films.”

— Tom Hooper

26. “Films about the English monarchy, they tend to have a lavishness, sumptuous imagery, it’s all very posh and rich.”

— Tom Hooper

27. “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.”

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

30. “Thank you to my wonderful actors, the triangle of man-love which is Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and me.”

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper

32. “I have a yearning someday to do one of these huge juggernauts.”

— Tom Hooper

33. “I appear to be drawn to iconic characters and what they reflect back to our cultures.”

— Tom Hooper

34. “Actors enjoy being treated as ordinary people.”

— Tom Hooper

35. “Nowadays filmmakers tend to recycle the same cliches over and over again.”

— Tom Hooper

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

— Tom Hooper