Tom Hooper Quotes

'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.

When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

War can be so impersonal yet when we put a name, a face, a place and match it to families, then war is not impersonal.

After the Second World War, people in Japan no longer died for their country, and even that expression was no longer used.

Both of my grandfathers fought in the Second World War, and my great-grandfather died at the Somme in the First World War. I never truly believed that the War just finished and everyone was happy-clappy, brought out the bunting, and felt everything was okay again. That's definitely not my impression of the fall-out of war.

A large part of my life revolves around my dad. Sometimes, I even feel a strong sense of connection, something very tangible when I learn something new in the martial arts.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.

I could not tell you the date of my mother's death. I could not tell you the date of my dad's death. These are not dates that I find significant.

The accounting of the sacrifice is, more than anything else, the attitude toward war memorials in our time.

My father, who had lost a brother, fighting on the Austrian side in World War I, was a committed pacifist.

My father was in the First World War.

My father has been a voice of encouragement in times of desperation for so many people. But he died when I was so young that, for me, his music has been a way for me to get to know him better.

Culturally, the First World War is the war that stands in for other wars.

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.

I like a decent funeral, and God knows in my family we've seen enough of them. Looking through family photographs now is like watching an episode of 'Dad's Army.'

It was quite a European war until 1917, when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

Many of the best films made about war have come out after the wars have ended. People need a period of time to reflect on them.

I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.

My grandfather was in the military, and I've been part of the Folds of Honor Foundation since 2009, so having the opportunity to wear Puma's Volition America collection is the perfect fit for me.

If I would be born in New Zealand, maybe, I would never write the Polish Requiem or pieces which were connected with the history of war. But this was my childhood. War was the main subject, and also in our family.

I had so many people in my family with dementia that it felt like it belonged to me in a way. I feel like the same with teenage depression because I went through it. I feel like I'm allowed to write about it; it's mine.