The King's Speech: Bringing Together Firth & Rush

6 January 2011

The King's Speech

The King's Speech has been a much talked about movie for several months as it won over audiences and critics on the festival circuit.

And this week we finally get to see Tom Hooper's latest project as he brings King George VI's struggle to the big screen.

Colin Firth takes on the central role as he battles with a stammer while Geoffrey Rush is back on the big screen as speech therapist Lionel Logue.

Tom met with Colin Firth about playing the role of the King and was immediately convinced. "Everything I read about King George VI showed that the King had this indestructible core of niceness at the centre of his being - I feel the very same way about Colin, he has this extraordinary moral compass, humility and kindness that I strongly felt made him perfect for Bertie.

"And going right back to Colin's role in "Tumbledown", his extraordinary performance of a physically and emotionally damaged veteran of the Falklands war, I had been a long term admirer of his ability to dramatize vulnerability with compelling force.

"He also immediately brought to bear his remarkable intelligence on the role, taking on the complexity of the history with great flair."

The production then had the good fortune to discover through its research that Lionel Logue had a grandson living in London, Mark Logue, who still had Logue's papers, all unpublished and never seen by any historians of the period.

They included a diary detailing his working relationship with the King, fragments of an autobiography, even the King's medical report card! Immediately the script was rewritten to include gems of information from the diaries.

Helped by this treasure trove of information Tom and Colin immediately began work researching the King's stammer, watching all available archive of the King and meeting contemporary speech therapists.

"A lot of speech problems stem from children feeling their voices are not heard. That no one cares what they say and that makes them increasingly hesitant about being able to speak," says director Hooper.

"Bertie was afflicted by this stammer at a time where people considered it a sign of mental weakness. He had a really bleak upbringing.

"His father King George V treated his sons like recalcitrant naval cadets with himself as the commanding officer. There was a complete lack of any emotional connection with his parents and as a left-handed child he was retrained to be right-handed, he had bowed legs and was retrained by having to wear metal splints for years.

"I am sure his stammer came from all that. This is the story about how this man overcame this to become a great king. He was probably the most reluctant king in history." Hooper continues,

"This is not a story about a man who wants power - this is a story about a man who will give anything not to be king. He absolutely deep in his heart does not want the job and Lionel Logue is the man who helps him get through this incredible fear of taking on that responsibility."

Geoffrey was inspired by the relationship between the King and Lionel Logue, "You can see in film footage of Prince Albert how much inner turmoil is going on in his life as somebody who hasn’t got a comfortable control of their voice, particularly in public.

"But when he bursts a smile, you can see his warmth, in some ways the story takes on a Shakespearean dimension because you get the big outer world and you get a very good look at the inner life of the man."

For Seidler too the heart of the story is about being heard and having a voice. "Bertie is the second son. His brother David is immensely popular, he could speak beautifully, he could handle the microphone brilliantly, he was good looking, he was dashing, he was stylish and he was everyone’s Prince Charming.

"Poor Bertie was shy, stammering and stuttering, but a family man. He was deeply in love with Elizabeth, they had two beautiful daughters and he just wanted to be left alone.

"He knew he had to do the occasional royal duty but they were very minor. Until the occasion of the closing of the Wembley Stadium Empire Exhibition. It was just heartbreaking, he absolutely freezes he just can’t do it.

"Bertie understood that for privilege you pay the price of duty. I think Churchill chose his word perfectly when Bertie died. Churchill presented a wreath of flowers with just one word on it: 'Valour'."

Hooper takes up the story. "He had seen every top speech therapist and doctor and got nowhere. Lionel Logue was the last record card in the box, he was the maverick and what saved Bertie is their friendship, more than the talking cure.

"When he broadcasts Logue is in the room with him and he tells Logue the speech like you would tell a friend a speech. It’s really a story about that friendship."

Rush explains of Logue "He got into speech therapy when he started to work a lot with soldiers returning to Australia from the front in Europe who were suffering from shell-shock and were verbally locked.

"He knew a lot about anatomy and muscle therapy and breathing exercises. He pioneered an almost psychotherapeutic approach. 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 in the child that creates stammering.

"It's unblocking that that gives a little bit of edge to Lionel trying to get inside this royal persona who is very formal and stamped by centuries of tradition."

Hooper was eager to tell the well-known story of the abdication from an unusual angle. "One of the reasons why this appealed to me was it is such a subversive look at the abdication. It's the 'B' plot in history, the abdication crisis and Wallis Simpson being the 'A' plot.

"It's not general knowledge that the man helping Bertie was Australian. I wanted the film to have a modernity and not to be stuffy and traditional."

For half-Australian Hooper, the fact that Logue was Antipodean was immensely important, "There is something in the Australian culture that is very democratic, that’s anti-hierarchy, anti-class, and it's someone coming with that kind of relaxed energy that could break through all the problems created by Bertie’s class and his incredibly austere upbringing.

"As the son of an English father who went to boarding school from the age of five after his own father died in the war, and an Australian mother, I know from my upbringing a little bit about the story of an Australian unpacking the effects of a tough English childhood!"

Rush adds, "The relationship between Bertie and Lionel is fuelled by the unlikelihood of them meeting. There's something that's really intriguing about that cultural and class gap between this unknown figure from Perth, finding his way into the upper echelons of into the English royal household.

"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 to the Australians.

"The film looks at the contrast between their families, there is a more open, easier feel to the Australian lower-middle class family as opposed to the pressure that Bertie feels."