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 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.

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.

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

There's something about being cerebral, intellectual, and yet emotionally repressed [in being villain]. If you think someone's doing this [bad] stuff and they're in complete control, that's more scary than if they're out of control.

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