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.

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.

When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What I learned about stammering was that, when as a young child you lose the confidence of anyone who wants to listen to you, you lose confidence in your voice and the right to speech. And a lot of the therapy was saying, 'You have a right to be heard.'

The hardest part of directing is the choosing. Unlike an actor who can do a variety of work, it is a year of your life, you can't afford to get it wrong.

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.'

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.

My dad said, 'The thing that I was told that was really helpful was that I mustn't be afraid of the things I was afraid of when I was five years old'. The shock of his childhood had put him in this defensive crouch against the world, and he needed to know that he had a nice wife and kids and it wasn't the same any more.

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

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

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

I come from the kind of family where work is work; my parents always taught me that it's better to be doing something than sitting around doing nothing.

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

I love the incredible variety of demands directing makes on you, from the entrepreneur to the hustler to the deal-maker to the writer; to directing actors and the camera and working with music, sound, marketing and promotion. It uses so many sides of your brain.

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

I think directors can become overly infatuated by gilt and gold, and the word 'lavish' and everything being magnificent.

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

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

Some films clearly seem to divide people. And I do think there's something incredibly exciting about the commonality of us as human beings, which some films are lucky enough to tap into.

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

What's fascinating about the Australians is they have this quality that they are impervious to majesty. They're not awed.

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.

A British villain never loses their sense of humour.

We're making a commercial Hindi film catering to all types of audiences.

I wonder if that's hurt me at the box office. Maybe audiences these days want to know exactly what to expect when they go into a movie, and my movies are hard to explain in just one way.

Audiences always sound like they're glad to see me, and I'm damned glad to see them.

What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.

We make films that we ourselves would want to see and then hope that other people would want to see it. If you try to analyze audiences or think there's some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You're making it too complicated.

Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see.

Phish and Dave Matthews really know their audiences and really treat them well.

We were tremendously encouraged by the testing of Analyze That. Audiences loved it. They were telling us that they liked it as much as the original. We recorded the laughs in the theater.

Anyway, I collapsed in France in the middle of a tour. I hadn't been eating properly, I was getting very phobic about audiences, and I collapsed in pure fright.

Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.

I don't pay attention to target audiences and therefore I often hear that I am a ratings killer, somebody who fundamentally doesn't care whether one person is watching or an entire soccer stadium.

I want to do what I want when I want to do it not be dictated to by audiences.

I also want to return to doing stand-up. I've become frightened of live audiences. This is a really telling sign that I need to go back on the comedy circuit again.

For me to go back and to play for audiences some of whom have been following me for thirty years and some who have found me in the last five or six years, that's really an interesting thing. I have an audience that goes from kids to seventy year olds.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

Audiences like their blues singers to be miserable.

The sound is the key; audiences will accept visual discontinuity much more easily than they'll accept jumps in the sound. If the track makes sense, you can do almost anything visually.

Those two songs condense the two albums. They also show what the audiences wanted. I was desperate to keep the band together and find something that the public would like.