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Film Education held a special preview of The King's Speech for schools followed by a Q&A session with the film's director Tom Hooper and lead actor Colin Firth.

A group of students from St Charles Sixth Form College were also able to attend a Salon style discussion group to debate filmmaking, the British film industry and the filmmakers' careers in more detail.

This Q&A took place on Tuesday 7 December 2010 at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, London

Transcript of Q&A

Question 1

Can you tell us more about dealing with the sensitive the issue of speech disorder in the film?

Tom Hooper: The story of how this film can to be really begins in the Second World War with a small boy who had a severe stammer and this little boy used to listen to King George the Sixth on the radio and think ‘Well, if the King of England can cope with a stammer, maybe there is hope for me’ and that little boy turned out to be the writer of our film David Seidler. So as a kid in the 1940s the King was David’s boyhood hero and inspiration and guiding light and when he became a writer he longed to write a film about King George the Sixth so he became to research the film and was getting these intriguing blips on the radar about one Lionel Logue, Speech Therapist – Australian Speech Therapist to the King which intrigued him. He tracked down the son of Lionel Logue, Valentine Logue, who told him he had in his attic a set of hand written diaries, written by his father about his relationship with the King but he had to write to the palace to get permission. So David the writer contacted the palace and the Queen Mother wrote back saying ‘Please not in my lifetime, the memories of these events are still too painful’. So it was some thirty years later when the Queen Mother passed away that David finally sat down to write the screenplay so it was a very, very long journey for him.

Question 2

Do you feel a weight and responsibility to tell the truth for the characters you portray?

Colin Firth: I think you have to be very clear to everyone what the conceit is and I think if you are claiming it to be historical than you do have an obligation to make sure that what you are telling is not verifiably inaccurate. You also have to have room to manoeuvre and I think you just have to make it very, very clear whether you are saying you taking liberties or using artistic licence. And there has to be, you have to own the story. None of us really look like our characters, none of us sound quite like our characters, and no one knows precisely what took place in the speech therapy sessions. We know what took place in David Seidler, the writer’s, speech therapy sessions and we were able to draw on that. He is not quite the same generation but his generation overlapped and there is an awful lot you can draw from. Also it is very, very limiting not to be able to hang around with the people you are representing. The flow of information out of the palace is fairly non-existent so it is secondary stuff you know – you meet people who know them or who wrote about them. We had this embarrassment of riches with this extraordinary first hand account of letters and recorded conversations and diaries of Lionel Logue and of course his grandchildren, he’s quite a lot of them, are still around and have just published their own account to coincide with the film.

Question 3

How difficult was it to balance the wit and humour in the film with the seriousness of the subject matter?

Tom Hooper: A lot of the wit comes out the relationship between the two men, between this extraordinary culture clash of an English aristocrat and this Australian maverick and the extent to which Logue challenges the rules and the etiquette of being King. But one of the nice things, I mean Colin talked about the diaries, which we used as a resource. This was an extraordinary discover and imagine for me, nine weeks before the shoot, I finally get hold of the grandson of Lionel Logue who has these diaries sitting in his attic and this is a hand written account of Lionel Logue’s relationship with the King which no biographer has ever read, no historian has ever seen, no member of the Royal family has had their hands on. We had the first access to it and some of the funniest lines in the film were written by King George the Sixth and Lionel Logue. I’ll give you an example from the diaries – you know at the end of the big speech you have just seen Lionel turns to King and says ‘You still stammered on the W’ and the King says ‘Well I had to throw in a few so that they knew it was me’. Those lines are direct quotes from the diary, they were last spoken out loud by King George the Sixth and Lionel Logue in 1939 and the diaries were a wonderful insight into the humour of King George the Sixth and the humorous relationship between these two men.

Question 4

As an actor how do you communicate the speech difficulties and emotions of such a grand figure to the audience?

Colin Firth: I think it happens to everybody, whether you are speaking publicly or not, communication is never perfect and I think it is one of the greatest challenges in the human condition. You can never perfectly reach other people so communication is always flawed and that can be a source of immense frustration to all of us whether we have a speech impediment to deal with or not. Those are the things that occurred to me throughout this, you don’t have to be Duke of York or suddenly thrust onto the throne. Those things only heighten things which I think are universal. You are taking a situation, taking a man who is very lonely and very isolated and has grown up lonely and isolated and by making him a member of the Royal family in a very high stakes situation we are doing in a way what great tragedians have done or what Greek drama has done or what Shakespeare has done – you are taking a domestic drama and you are writing it large across history. When something dramatic happens in your life it shakes the world, if your relationship is breaking up, or if someone in your family is sick or if something goes wrong it’s seismic as far as you are concerned. The rest of the world probably doesn’t care all that much. By making it Royal you are setting it on a much grander stage and saying if this man wants to leave his wife it actually is a constitutional crisis, now that feels like a constitutional crisis in everyone’s marriage when it happens but it actually isn’t. This is where the world does care what is happening in your family so in a way it is a dramatic conceit and well as telling an interesting piece of history, its also taking something which I think is very personal and very universal and showing it through the prism of something much grander as you say.

Question 5

What do you think is the biggest challenge that the British film industry faces today?

Tom Hooper: Well, it’s interesting, I’ve lived through a really fascinating revolution. So I started marking films when I was 13 and when I was 13 there was no digital, you couldn’t shoot anything digitally because it didn’t exist yet so I had to shoot on film and I could only make films silently because I couldn’t afford to do sound and from four minutes of film I could maybe make a film that was two minutes log. And now what is extraordinary is that my i-phone has an HD camera on it with sync sound so all of us have the opportunity to make some kind of film for almost nothing if not nothing. The interesting thing is that I thought seeing this revolution happen there was going to be this big revolution where there would be a lot more films being made and being made a lot more cheaply. But the sad thing is that what hasn’t changed is the cost of marketing a film to the public. I’ll give you an example of the King’s Speech is being released in the US. The budget of our film was about 15 million dollars – at the very least they’ll probably spend 25 to 30 million marketing it America so they are going to spend almost double the cost of production on the cost of selling it and that is just in one country. So the sad thing about it is that there is still a kind of lock down on who gets to make films that reach everyone because even if you do effectively make your film for nothing, for a distributor they’ve still got to look at a huge amount of money to get the film out to everyone. So the revolution that I expected when the digital age came when I thought filmmaking would be very democratic hasn’t quite taken off. And the other thing that stopped that happening is unfortunately the star system, which still hasn’t gone away. In the end one of the ways to get the bandwidth to get people to pay attention to your films is to get a big star and that remains expensive.

Question 6

What advice would you give young filmmakers who want a career in the film industry?

Tom Hooper: I took the view as a teenager that you’ve got to make films and that’s my biggest advice. If you really want to be a director you’ve got to start making films in whatever way you can and be very open minded about the way of doing it because making a film is incredibly different from watching a film. There are certain pressures to do with how you make films that you have to get used to dealing with and become accustomed to. That is my main advice.

Colin Firth: I think its very interesting listening to what Tom is saying and I think doing things does unlock the imagination and advance creativity, it doesn’t come from nothing. You can’t sit and wait for inspiration – it doesn’t work. It’s certainly true that you can make a film cheaply; I keep finding films that my nine-year old made on my flip phone. He’s at it, he’s doing it and he’s developing something that while is certainly entertaining for him could also be a skill, a story telling skill. I was thinking while Tom was talking about how now anyone can make a film for almost nothing but its not happening because you also have to be rather good at it, there has to be a skill in place for it to work. But you achieve that by doing exactly what Tom has just said and what you now have which is a gift that my generation didn’t have quite so much access to is stuff that you can do it on. We’ve always had pencil and paper but now we have filmmaking materials at our fingertips.

Tom Hooper: The other thing that is extraordinary is that you can make a film and you have the right to post it on YouTube.

Colin Firth: Yes you can release it yourself.

Tom Hooper: You can put it out in public and get some people seeing it and that’s an unbelievable revolution. Again, in the old days I made my films but no one saw them apart from my family them because how would anyone see them.