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

I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether its shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether its a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. Its truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day. – Tom Hooper
American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class, age, gender, culture. – Tom Hooper
The African Americans relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allens African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa. – Henry Louis Gates