55 Facts About Tom Hooper

Thomas George Hooper was born on 5 October 1972 and is a British-Australian filmmaker.

Tom Hooper began making short films as a teenager and had his first professional short, Painted Faces, broadcast on Channel 4 in 1992.

Tom Hooper continued working for HBO on the television film Longford and in John Adams, a seven-part serial on the life of the American president.

Tom Hooper returned to features with The Damned United, a fact-based film about the English football manager Brian Clough.

Recently, Tom Hooper has directed two episodes of His Dark Materials and a live-action adaptation of the musical Cats, for which he won two Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Director and Worst Screenplay.

Tom Hooper's work was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for Prime Suspect and John Adams, won one for Elizabeth I, and was nominated for the British Academy TV Craft Award for Best Director for Longford.

Tom Hooper was born on 5 October 1972 in London, England, the son of Meredith Jean and Richard Hooper.

At the age of 12, Tom Hooper read a book entitled How to Make Film and Television and decided he wanted to become a director.

Tom Hooper classified the short, about a dog which kept running away from its owner, as a comedy, and filmed it on location in Oxfordshire.

When Tom Hooper was 14, his film Bomber Jacket came runner-up in a BBC younger filmmakers' competition.

Tom Hooper finished school aged 16, then wrote the script for his first professional short film, entitled Painted Faces.

Tom Hooper spent the next two years raising capital for the short by courting advertisement directors, whose financial dominance during the late 1980s was noticed by Hooper.

Tom Hooper joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where he directed Kate Beckinsale in A View from the Bridge and Emily Mortimer in The Trial.

Tom Hooper continues to direct advertisements alongside television and film projects.

Tom Hooper was introduced by his father to the television producer Matthew Robinson, who mentored Hooper and gave him his first television directing work.

For Robinson, Tom Hooper directed episodes of the short-lived Tyne Tees Television soap opera Quayside in 1997, four episodes of the Children's BBC television series Byker Grove in the same year, and his first episodes of the BBC One soap opera EastEnders in 1998.

Tom Hooper directed several EastEnders episodes between 1998 and 2000, two of which were hour-long specials that represented the soap when it won the British Academy Television Award for Best Soap Opera in 2000 and 2001; the first was the episode in which Carol Jackson learns her daughter Bianca had an affair with her fiance Dan Sullivan.

Tom Hooper worked 10-hour days on EastEnders, and learned to direct with speed.

Tom Hooper was influenced in his early career by the cinematic style of American TV series such as ER, NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street and tried to work that style into his EastEnders episodes; one scene featuring Grant Mitchell involved a crane shot, which Hooper believes made him infamous among the EastEnders production crew.

In 1999, Tom Hooper directed two episodes of Granada Television's comedy-drama television series Cold Feet, which marked his move to bigger-budget productions.

In 2001, Tom Hooper directed his first of two costume dramas for the BBC; Love in a Cold Climate was based on Nancy Mitford's novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.

In 2002, Tom Hooper directed Daniel Deronda, adapted from George Eliot's novel.

Tom Hooper returned to Granada the next year to direct the revival of Prime Suspect, entitled The Last Witness.

Tom Hooper initially declined to direct the production because he believed the series was tired.

Tom Hooper received nominations for the British Academy Television Award for Best Drama Serial and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special for his work on Prime Suspect.

Tom Hooper made his debut as a feature film director with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission drama Red Dust, which stars Hilary Swank, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jamie Bartlett.

Tom Hooper had been working on a biographical film with Joan Didion about Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, since 2006 when he was asked by Hanks to helm the programme.

Tom Hooper was surprised to learn that the American Revolutionary War was not a well-documented period in film and television; Abigail Adams actress Laura Linney told him that, for her generation, the musical 1776 was the most well-known depiction of the era.

Director Tom Hooper lets his actors shine, as he did so marvelously in Helen Mirren's Elizabeth I and the child-killer drama Longford, but he complements them, too, with this kind of immediate point of view.

John Adams received 23 Emmy Award nominations, including another Outstanding Direction nomination for Tom Hooper, and won 13, the highest number for any nominee in a single year.

Tom Hooper was nominated for the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement.

Tom Hooper received a copy of the script while shooting John Adams in Hungary and noticed a similarity between the "egotistical, flawed, brilliant" Adams and the "egotistical, flawed, brilliant" Clough.

Tom Hooper was not put off by joining the project later, as Morgan's script was in only its first draft.

Tom Hooper cast Timothy Spall as Clough's assistant Peter Taylor, Colm Meaney as Don Revie and Jim Broadbent as Derby County chairman Sam Longson.

Tom Hooper came back and said 'you've got to read this play,' and I read it and it was brilliant.

Tom Hooper cast Colin Firth as George VI and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue and spent three weeks with the actors reading the script and rehearsing.

Tom Hooper completed the final cut of the film at the end of August 2010 and presented it a few days later at the Telluride Film Festival.

The film won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and Tom Hooper won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures.

In March 2009, Tom Hooper met with Nelson Mandela in preparation for directing a film adaptation of Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.

Tom Hooper was offered the chance to direct Iron Man 3 for Marvel Studios but declined and instead signed on to direct Les Miserables for Working Title Films, which he had first heard about while discussing a different project with screenwriter William Nicholson in 2010.

Tom Hooper had not seen the musical, so watched a performance of it in London's West End.

The role of Fantine was hugely contested; Tom Hooper said, "It was like half a dozen of the biggest female movie stars on the planet wanted to play the role".

Tom Hooper investigated filming the feature in 3D, and performed some camera tests before deciding to film it with traditional 2D methods.

Tom Hooper told Los Angeles Times that he thought there was a "slightly strange falseness" when he saw musical films where the actors sang to recordings.

Tom Hooper co-produced the original song "Beautiful Ghosts" with Lloyd Webber and Greg Wells, written by Swift and Lloyd Webber.

Tom Hooper uses camera styles "that encode the DNA of the storytelling in some way" and will reuse and develop filming styles in successive productions.

Tom Hooper identifies research as being key to his process of directing period dramas such as John Adams to make the scenes authentic.

Tom Hooper has been influenced by cinematographer Larry Smith, who worked with Stanley Kubrick and advised Tom Hooper of techniques used by Kubrick.

Similarly, in The Damned United, Tom Hooper began to experiment with using wide-angle lenses and putting actors in the extreme edges of the frame.

Tom Hooper was influenced by the unusual framing from social photography of the 1970s, and he and Ben Smithard decided to adopt the framing style while scouting locations.

Tom Hooper used the same style in The King's Speech, particularly in the scene where Bertie and Logue meet in Logue's consulting room; Colin Firth is framed to the extreme left of the picture, leaving most of the shot dominated by the rough wall behind Firth.

Tom Hooper said the use of this method in the first consulting room scene served to "suggest the awkwardness and tension of Logue and Bertie's first meeting".

One member of the VFX team said Tom Hooper's treatment "was pure, almost slavery for us", with six months to complete the trailer, and only four months to complete the film.

Tom Hooper supposedly had no inclination as to the process of visual effects, thus the VFX department could not show Tom Hooper the step-by-step process of what he wanted, such as animatics, unless it was already rendered.

Tom Hooper has directed multiple Academy Award-nominated performances, three of which have won.