The Kings Speech | Behind the Scenes

for alberti who never in a million years dreamed that he would be flung into the public spotlight goes through a pretty dark night of the soul about fronting up to that kind of public responsibility he was not equipped in his personality or um or suited being king in any way and he knew it it was more than just a stammer he was terribly shy he was underconfident physically he wasn't that strong yearning for a larger audience he doesn't have the sort of the flair and the confidence that he's that his brother does and um so even prior to the application and prior to him having to become king he's just sort of struggling with with the world that he's in anyway i can cure your husband but for my method to work i need trust and total equality here in the safety of my consultation room when can you start he was a sort of failed slightly amateur actor more out of a passion for the language of shakespeare now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by the sun of york australia would have been a fairly unknown quantity in the 20s and 30s to most english people and they probably had a slightly shall we say imperial attitude towards the antibodies i'm not hearing the cries of a deformed creature yearning to be king nor did i realize richard iii was king of the colonies i think the premise alone is pretty compelling this unlikely relationship between a man who lives in this very lonely and rarefied existence and a man he's very unlikely to meet under any other circumstances please call milan uh fifa doctor i prefer lionel what'll i call you yeah well highness and then sir after that how about bertie he obviously feels he can't work effectively if he has to observe all those protocols if he has to sit a certain distance from the person opposite him and he has to bow and say your imagination or your royal highness or sir all that has to be going on when in fact he has to break down a few barriers in order to be able to help this man i'm not here to discuss personal matters why are you hearing he kind of pioneered an almost psychotherapeutic approach that he knew the problem was not simply a physical one that there was something mostly around the age of four or five some kind of trauma within the child that creates stammering there was a technical side to it as well but even that i think did something to help break down the formality of their relationship i mean it's very very difficult to continue to keep a distance from somebody if you've been rolling around on the floor with them like all relationships which are meaningful they're not smooth what are you doing get up you can't sit there get up why not sure no this that is not a chair that is that that is saint edward's chair people of course [Music] you know we called it the bromance uh which it is it's um it's a brotherly love story colin's just delightful you know it's a thrill to share the screen and to watch him you know that's one of the great things about being an actor is actually sort of being in front of other actors while they do their stuff and kind of going wow so he's got a really great sense of drama and what's entertaining and there's a lot going on the role has a enormous dimension and a lot of texture to it because it's the journey towards becoming a king or becoming a human being in a funny sort of way and watching him do that has been beautiful heartbreaking very powerful he's just found this extraordinary variation depending on who he's with as a character you know how how debilitating or how frustrating the the level of stammering can become i think he's recent to the challenge and i think it's a truly great performance this film stands or falls by the amount you care about this guy's fate collins genius is is the extent to which he allows you in and allows you to care for him and want him to succeed 40 seconds [Music] hello everybody thank you i know you're not clapping for me i'm matt holzman from kcrw and i'm really pleased thank you thank you very much really pleased to be here tonight to moderate this q a for this fine movie we've got uh the director and really a royal group of film and stage actors here for you tonight so let's bring our cast out let's start with us queen mary claire bloom as king edward guy pierce as the director tom hooper as queen elizabeth helena bonham carter and as king george vi calling first um i want to say thank you for an extraordinary film you know thomas i just want to start with you this is one of the greatest ensembles of all time and that is clearly true uh what was it like directing such incredible actors well i love actors so um [Applause] and and you know i remember the read-through where i sat at a table and had these wonderful four actors as well as jeffrey rush as well as sir michael gambon sir derek jacoby anthony andrews timothy spall jennifer ely being reunited on screen for the first time with colin since pride and prejudice and the the amount of cinematic and theatrical history in that rehearsal room was quite extraordinary and um as a director i mean you know you you set your sights on certain actors you want to work with early i mean helena i've set my sights on one time to work with her when i was i don't know a teenager and she was doing room with you i was making runaway dog on my clockwork bolex camera and um but i said you know that i've got i've got to work with that now it's taking me a little bit of time don't wait so long and even when it came to it i still had to twist her arm a little bit but uh one of the great pleasures is actors you've watched and admired for many years we're finally getting to work with them and the ensemble in this film was was just an utter joy colin um i want to read a quote from the british stammering association yes it says colin firth does an incredibly realistic job of conveying how it is to be stuck in a block with no control over your speech so i i i'm sorry it's it's such an obvious question but how did you decide to portray the stammer in the way that you did it's a feat of the imagination i suppose it's all you've got you can harvest all the information that's available which is just what other people tell you you can listen to people who struggle with it an awful lot of experts on on on how not to start it um there are books written that help people not to start it but there is not a lot of information on how to stutter and no no experts you could write it um yes i may be the the sole authority um good tie-in merchandise it's um our writer david zeidler had struggled through his childhood and much of his life with it with with that problem and uh this is what uh inspired him to write this and [Music] although he couldn't he didn't really attempt to tell me what was going on technically with george vi he was able to give me a very rich and disturbing picture of what the experience was he talked about the sensation of being underwater you know and that drowning that image of drowning helped me actually because i i felt i felt i sensed something of that in george vi in some of the footage that tom and i watched of george and six that his worst when he really hits the block and goes into this um abject silence which we both found heartbreaking um and you do see like a like an infant or like an animal there's just no way you can use that fundamental human faculty of language it's just it's not an option and it must feel like an eternity when you're in it so just looking at that gave me a lot of information about what i was aiming at uh we did have a lady come in one day and talk a little bit about the technical things that happen what happens in the throat what happens in the front of the mouth that's with me um but you you know and tom was incredibly valuable to me in terms of almost scoring it and how much we we felt we could afford to portray in the film and uh with tom it was basically more um [Laughter] you know i found it quite a struggle to do it and i was worried that we were impossibly in danger of alienating people if we if we did too much just because it's so painful to watch well if you yes i mean it's it's a it's something that has to be judged very carefully i mean if you if you sell it short then the stakes are very low and uh you you don't feel that lionel has really got anything at stake there's no issue you know they could slow the movie down quite a lot well there's a danger that the movie could last four hours yes yes um there's also a question of you know the movie has humor it has pace it does all that sort of thing and also helena had a home to go to uh which she made very clear you know the supportive wife so basically when tom said i want you to stammer on every line i was you know fairly mortified with the thought but helena went white as a sheep [Laughter] well it's harder for her because you know what is acting but reacting and she had to react for a long time because he kept stammering um did you actually come up with a couple of different kind of versions of what the stammer would sound like and discuss it with with tom in the cast or engineer no i mean i i think once we listened to him we made a decision right um you know there are it does it is specific to people it it there isn't just one sound and and sometimes you get it it represents itself as a repetition and other cases such as this if just a block and uh it was quite clear that that's that's what we were listening to helena um you had a fascinating role to play because you have to play both a queen who is uh cool and calm and composed and you also play a wife who was incredibly loving and supportive i mean and it seemed to me it would have been very easy to come off a little bit um sociopathic because they really are two totally separate characters in a way are they oh i i think that i don't expect i will say okay okay my one take on the queen one because the thing is if you get to play here it's there's a hell of a lot to get through there's about five inches of biography i only had about three weeks so i'm not great at speed reading so but there's one sentence that made sense to me which was i think it was um cecil beaton and he said that uh she was a marshmallow but made with a welding machine and that was i just thought oh thank god i've got something to play is that the only sentence that made sense to you i told you i wasn't high functioning so anyway i i just that was big highlight i thought oh great i'd have to read the rest got it and then then so we're at so what i'm saying is that there was a public front that she hid behind and that sort of sweetness and that head cocked did my neck in many many times but that sweetness that she projected was a real front under which she could operate this for guy from from facebook it doesn't say who uh but it says this is not a question it's a statement but i'll say it anyway last year you were in the hurt locker i think you're aware of that yes are you was that the question uh no uh are you good luck in your films are you planning to make an appearance in the best picture films every year yes okay let's move on hugely in demand this man really for five minutes in the best picture uh film from now on i i cast him entirely as a lucky charm you don't have any lies you're just going to sit on the stage and look i was in the godfather too but really just for a minute in the wedding scene and you really don't even know that i'm there i was quite young you were wonderful i thought it seemed like you had to play this very kind of fine line between kind of well the relationship is a very complicated one in some ways he sees his brother as his way out and he also wants to let his brother know that he's better in some ways or you know tell me more about that relationship well on some level i don't know that it's that unusual a relationship really i mean everything that we we read um about these two sort of indicated that i mean they were only how how many years apart were they really two or three i think about that yeah yeah so they were really quite close um and i think uh i think they you know relied on each other the way that the way that brothers did and i think the the the um situation that we see where i sort of um imitate the stutter in front of uh bertie had actually happened a number of times um so people had witnessed him do that yes sure and i think but i think he'd also done it when they were you know very young as well as as sort of brothers do so i don't i don't really see it as a particularly unusual relationship you know the stakes are higher i guess well the stakes are higher absolutely i mean i'm not sure whether in in growing up uh really whether edward uh made it clear that he never really wanted to be king and that the in you know in the in the background of bertie's mind was the possibility that he would one day be king i'm not really sure when that became very clear to bertie to be honest only at the very last minute i mean it had no precedent this has never and no no english king had ever abdicated um no i'm sure that even if bertie thought to himself well you know thank god david's the one that's that yes and there is the older brother trying to push the younger brother trying to push the older brother off the throne positively medieval is actually a quote from a letter from from david to bertie um david i think it's just gone abroad and he was a joke that's right but while he was away you know i don't know whether bertie was sort of taking up some sort of responsibility but that was definitely um alive in in his mind at least from a humorous point of view um in the new yorker anthony lane calls queen mary i love this quote about as warm and tender as a submarine filled with sorbet and i'm wondering how you know how do you prepare to portray a submarine filled with sorbet that's not what you play yes they i think you could easily say they were a dysfunctional family you could easily say that really and she particularly though there's a very good film um called the lost prince the subject i didn't know about at all where miranda richardson plays much younger queen mary most wonderfully and she had a child another one of her sons was an epileptic and in those days that for for a royal family to produce a faulty son or child was you couldn't countenance he was hidden um it apparently had a terrible effect on her and i think froze her i mean nobody's born frozen right and um i would imagine that a most unhappy marriage i can't think of anything much worse than being married to george v frankly and probably neither could she right well at the point when edward uh hugs her and that pain look on her face is a remarkable remarkable scene because it's a woman who really does not know what to do simply doesn't know how to how to behave how to react as a human being from one to the other and as frightened as i think uh i don't say anymore but the english were of open emotion and it was very raw emotion right i i apologize for asking you this question because i'm sure it's something that is asked of you every time you appear but obviously you work with the great charlie chaplin what was it like to to work with him it was it was so so extraordinary he was a wonderful man a wonderful mentor marvelous colleague i mean i was 19 he was 61 i thought that was ancient and um never treated me as anything other than so i was a professional actress which i'd only really just become and i still consider myself the luckiest person in the world to have been plucked from nowhere to become chaplin's leading lady it still seems extraordinary he was very lucky to find you well it was lucky for me it opened her whole life uh you know tom this is a time in english royal history that has just been picked over with a fine-tooth comb and wondering why have we not heard the story before and how did you find it well because the english traditionally have not been highly welcoming to the need for therapy um and so you can imagine a story about a king needing a therapist and that therapist being australian was something that was put into the footnotes of the history books and was quite marginalized and you know if you'd googled lionel though two years ago i think you got two hits a little different now uh but really we we knew very little about lionel logue in fact when we started jeffrey rush um was desperate to know what he looked like or you know find a photograph of him and we didn't we had no photographs we didn't know his kids names we knew very little um and david cyder the writer had effectively had to sort of invent lionel logue and then the the turning point came nine weeks before the shoot when we tracked down the grandson of lionel logue living in london 10 minutes from where i live and and in his attic was a handwritten diary account of his grandfather's relationship with the king which no historian knew existed no royal biographer has ever read no remember the royal family had ever seen and nine weeks before the shoot we had this treasure trove in our hands and um a few of the best lines of dialogue five or six are written by king george vi and lionel though and i'll give you an example at the end of the big speech lionel turns to the king and says you still stammered on the w and the king says well i had to throw in a few so they knew it was me those lines are written by king george the sixth in 9 11. well i'm afraid we're going to have to leave it there i want to say thank you all for coming out tonight thank you on the web for watching and thank you so so much thank you to claire bloom to guy pierce to tom hooper helen obama carter and colin firth thank you all for being here thank you thank you night thank you [Music] you

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Keywords: the kings speech behind the scenes, colin firth, Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech, the kings speech, Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce, Michael Gambon, the kings speech 2010 movie, the king's speech 2010 movie, the kings speech 2010 movie bonus material, the kings speech 2010 movie extras, the kings speech 2010 movie making, the king's speech 2010 movie making, world war 2, colin firth speech, movies, behind the scenes, king george vi, king george v, lionel logue

Id: tR3kORgesAk

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021