Tom Hooper

In Prime Suspect (1991), a conversation can be uncomfortable simply because somebody needs a useful answer and somebody else resents the question. We felt worn down by the resistance surrounding Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison, because even getting people to cooperate requires such effort. The programme earns our strong recommendation by letting actors show how work gets done between people who would rather not help one another. Hooper directed the 2003 revival, Prime Suspect: The Last Witness. The series has several directors, so its virtues cannot all be assigned to him.

His television work took him from the costume drama Love in a Cold Climate (2001) to the historical miniseries John Adams (2008). Period settings and emotionally demanding parts were central to his work before his cinema breakthrough. That came with The King's Speech (2010), with Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush giving him the concentrated performances his approach suits.

The difficulty is how insistently he can photograph that work. His collaborators include cinematographer Danny Cohen, and Hooper favours wide-angle lenses and actors placed at the extreme edges of the frame. Those choices can make a person look ill at ease before a word has been spoken. They can also leave us attending to the composition when the performance was quite sufficient.

Les Misérables (2012) makes the attraction and the problem particularly clear: singing recorded live on set gives performers control over pace and feeling, while the close-ups keep pressing us towards them. We respect the decision to let actors shape a song, but the persistent close-ups can make an intimate performance feel forced. The move into musicals continued with Cats (2019), which he also co-wrote. We would begin with The Last Witness, before moving on to the musicals.