Tom Hooper Interview

Tom Hooper, director of The Damned United and, more recently, The King’s Speech was in London last week to show his support for the Jameson Empire Awards Done in Sixty Seconds Competition, of which he on the judging panel. I was lucky enough to spend a few minutes chatting about the competition and Hooper’s films. Hooper was charming, eloquent and affable and much younger than I had expected him to be. It was a shame we only had a short time to spend with the busy director as I could have quite happily continued to quiz him all afternoon. With thanks to Craig Grobler (@The_EST) and Alan Simmons (@v_for_vienetta) for additional questions.

Congratulations on your success with The King’s Speech and thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. We’re here to talk about the Jameson Empire Awards Done in 60 Seconds competition, what can you tell us about it?

The idea is that anyone can enter, but it’s a competition for amateur filmmakers. On the Jameson Empire Awards night, it’s the only award for the non-professional filmmaking community. [The films submitted for entry are] a maximum of sixty seconds and the idea is you get to do a pastiche or homage to your favourite film. Last year the winner was a hilarious Top Gun sixty second spoof, which made a lot of humour out of the homoerotic undertones of Top Gun which I think was a spoof that needed to be done. What I like about this is that one of my backgrounds was in directing commercials – there’s a great generation of filmmakers that has come out of that, like Tony and Ridley Scott and Hugh Hudson – I always enjoyed doing commercials because of the discipline in telling a story in sixty seconds or in thirty seconds is incredibly good for a filmmaker because it forces you to think about the clarity of the idea of every shot. The shot has an economy in communicating its story, or its message or its narrative beat in a way that in a couple of seconds you can read it. That’s an incredibly good skill for filmmaking generally because filmmaking is so much about how you encode the story needs of a moment through the way you shoot something or the way you stage something. In judging this competition, what I thought a lot about is the extraordinary irony of this revolution that I’ve witnessed within my lifetime. I started at the age of twelve making films with a clockwork Bolex camera where the camera could only run for thirty seconds because the clockwork ran out so that was the length of the shot. I could only afford a hundred foot of Kodachrome film, for about twenty-five quid, which you had to send off for two weeks to be processed. I could only make silent movies because sound was too expensive and complicated and so I would make silent movies and run the camera slow at about sixteen frames per second to squeeze out about four minutes and I could make films that were about two minutes long. Now, the mobile phone in my pocket has a 2K camera, with sync sound, every new computer, I gather, is preloaded with editing software and so filmmaking has had this extraordinary democratisation where anyone can have a go and it’s no longer painfully complicated to understand light meters and film speeds and film stocks. You don’t have to hold fear that you’ll send your Kodachrome hundred foot to Germany and it’ll never come back because it gets lost in the post. And so what’s great about the competition is that anyone can enter I feel that now almost anyone can have a go. Filmmaking is no longer the preserve of people who can get hold of the gear and figure it out, it’s great.

Have you seen any of the entries yet and if so, what is the level of quality like?

No, I get to see them a couple of days before the awards themselves, but I hope they’re going to be amazingly high quality. I hope it’ll be easy to work out the best one because as a judge you always live in fear of having more than one equally good film.

Who else is on the judging panel with you and what will you be looking for?

I don’t know, [to a Jameson representative] you can probably tell us that!

[Jameson representative] Mark Dinning from Empire will be there and closer to the time, one or two others from the film industry will be named – TBC really, but Tom is our head judge.

[Tom] Do I get a bigger vote than everyone else?

[Jameson] You get a casting vote if the voting is split.

[Tom] As a director, the idea of a democratic jury is quite hard!

How did Jameson and Empire get you involved in the awards, did it involve a case of whiskey?

I think I am going to be lucky enough to take home one bottle of whiskey. I quite liked the idea… I feel like when I was young and making films I would enter any competition that there was and I think I was runner up with my film Bomber Jacket for some BBC young filmmaker’s competition. The thing about competitions is that they give you a deadline and that makes you focus on doing it because once people say there’s a competition then that makes you do it by this date. The tricky thing with filmmaking is that you can always drift because it’s quite complicated to organise, even in the world I’m in now. The reason why The King’s Speech came together when it did was because Geoffrey Rush was doing a play and had to leave England by a certain date and I had to shoot it in a window. Without that, it would have been another three or six months it just knocks on unless you have a deadline. So I love competitions because they inspire people to get on with it by having something to aim at. Also, I think if just say, ‘do a sixty second film on whatever’, you can get paralysed by too much choice, but once you say, ‘make it a pastiche or homage to your favourite film’, everybody’s got a favourite film, which makes it slightly more contained as an idea. I remember the very first film I ever made, I think I was thirteen when I shot it, I remember getting incredibly paralysed thinking, ‘this is my first film, what should I do, what should I do?’ And in the end, my mum gave me some really good advice, she said, ‘don’t get too caught up in the idea that you have to do your masterwork at thirteen, just do something silly as an exercise.’ I made a film about a dog that keeps running away called Runaway Dog which was a comedy, it was a silly flippant movie, but I was actually released by being told not to make the best of your life, just do something to practice. I think that’s kind of the spirit of this, you’re not having to make a masterpiece in sixty seconds, you just have to go out and have some fun with it.

Clearly you’ve moved onto bigger and better things from making films as a child, but how would you go about making The Damned United or The King’s Speech in sixty seconds?

The lazy answer is if I was to cut them down, I’d probably just take sixty seconds of the trailer, which wouldn’t take long as they’re only two minutes long. I would have thought that The King’s Speech is quite easily spoof-able. I fully expect in next year’s Jameson Empire Awards for someone to spoof The King’s Speech.

If you had to do one that wasn’t your own film, what would you choose?

I have in my life spoofed The Godfather. We were staying with some American friends when I was a teenager and I decided to do quite an involved spoof of The Godfather which involved cotton wool in the cheeks and everything, I still think that’s a great one to do.

Is that on YouTube?

No, no! I haven’t put anything on YouTube, maybe I should.

Is it true that the Queen Mother gave her blessings for The King’s Speech to be made into a film, but not in her lifetime?

The story is that David Seidler, the writer, who actually had a severe stammer as a child and his interest in the story came from the fact that he used to listen to King George VI on the radio during the war and his parents used to say that if the king of England can cope, maybe there’s hope for you David. When he grew up and became a writer, his dream was to write this story. I think after he wrote Tucker [in 1988] for Francis Ford Coppola, he thought, okay, now maybe Hollywood loves me, I can write my story. He researched it, tracked down Valentine Logue, the middle son of Lionel [the speech therapist in the film]. He said he had some papers and stuff that belonged to my father, but you’d have to get permission from the palace. He wrote to the palace and the Queen Mother wrote back saying, ‘please not in my lifetime, the memories of these events are too painful’. So David waited, little realising that the Queen Mother was going to live to 186. So it was some twenty-five years later by the time he wrote it. It was quite sweet, when filmmakers go, ‘oh this film has taken forever to make’, for David, it really has. He’s in his seventies now, so it’s been a long time coming.

In The King’s Speech, Colin Firth’s character suffers from a crippling lack of confidence and obviously has difficulty speaking. In your previous film, The Damned United, Brian Clough has the opposite problem; he’s over confident and possibly speaks a little too much. What draws you to these flawed characters?

That’s very good. I just like people living on some kind of extreme edge. I think they are more interesting to direct and to play, they attract better actors. I’m very interested in character driven narratives. I do keep returning to people battling with flaws. The classic Hollywood drama is all about externalised good and evil – a person who represents good versus a person that represents evil, so it’s the Darth Vader, Star Wars filmmaking of my childhood, which I loved as a consumer, as an audience member, but I’m most interested in stories where there aren’t necessarily any bad guys and the conflict is internal to a character as opposed to external because there’s a dark lord trying to take over the world. If you think about The Damned United, even Leeds United, on one level it’s the enemy, but on another, it’s the enemy in Clough’s head. It’s the necessary invention that Clough needs to make to spur his ambition and to drive him on. You can clearly see that I as a filmmaker am saying Leeds are evil; it’s as much about Clough’s desire to make them the enemy as them being an enemy. In The King’s Speech, yes Cosmo Lang’s a little tricky at times, but really the enemy is the stammer, the enemy is the psychological block, the enemy is ghosts of his childhood. I think I’m drawn to that because it’s more interesting to watch actors fight out internal conflicts, wrestling with themselves, which is much more interesting than watching them wrestling with other people.

Have you got any tips for any wannabe entrants, specifically for directing actors?

When I started out, filming was expensive, shooting was expensive because film cost money, but nowadays in the digital age shooting is free, so I would say don’t be afraid of shooting a lot. Some of the best filmmakers in the world now shoot an immense amount to get the moment they want. Don’t feel that you have to do it in one or two takes. That’s one of the freedoms of the digital age. Know what you’re trying to say, is it a spoof is it homage, are you trying to send up a character or portray them seriously? But mostly I would say have a go. To know if you’re good at doing it, you can only find out through doing it. You can’t theoretically know whether you’re good at directing, it’s only through trying that you’ll discover that so if you want to be a director the most important thing is to get on and make films. There’s no substitute for it. You can read about it, you can watch it, but making films is a profoundly different thing.

I recently read that you were interested in directing a James Bond film. What would you bring to James Bond?

I would like to bring the wit back to James Bond. To reboot it inspired by the edginess of the Bourne films is brilliant but I think what I’m good at as a filmmaker is that combination of humour and tension, emotion and suspense. I think there’s a risk you can take James Bond too seriously.