The King's Speech

The King's Speech
British release poster
Directed by	Tom Hooper
Produced by	Iain Canning Emile Sherman Gareth Unwin
Written by	David Seidler
Starring	Colin Firth Geoffrey Rush Helena Bonham Carter Guy Pearce Timothy Spall Derek Jacobi Jennifer Ehle Michael Gambon
Music by	Alexandre Desplat
Cinematography	Danny Cohen
Edited by	Tariq Anwar
Production company	UK Film Council See-Saw Films Bedlam Productions
Distributed by	The Weinstein Company (US) Momentum Pictures (UK)
Release date	6 September 2010 (2010-09-06) (Telluride Film Festival) 7 January 2011 (2011-01-07) (United Kingdom)
Running time	119 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	$15 million
Box office	$414.2 million

The King's Speech is a 2010 British biographical drama film directed by Tom Hooper and written by David Seidler. Colin Firth plays the future King George VI who, to cope with a stammer, sees Lionel Logue, an Australian speech and language therapist played by Geoffrey Rush. The men become friends as they work together, and after his brother abdicates the throne, the new king relies on Logue to help him make his first wartime radio broadcast on Britain's declaration of war on Germany in 1939.

Seidler read about George VI's life after overcoming a stuttering condition he endured during his youth. He started writing about the relationship between the therapist and his royal patient as early as the 1980s, but at the request of the King's widow, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, postponed work until her death in 2002. He later rewrote his screenplay for the stage to focus on the essential relationship between the two protagonists. Nine weeks before filming began, Logue's notebooks were discovered and quotations from them were incorporated into the script.

Principal photography took place in London and around Britain from November 2009 to January 2010. The opening scenes were filmed at Elland Road, Leeds, and Odsal Stadium, Bradford, both locations standing in for the old Wembley Stadium. For indoor scenes, Lancaster House substituted for Buckingham Palace, and Ely Cathedral stood in for Westminster Abbey, while the weaving mill scene was filmed at the Queen Street Mill in Burnley. The cinematography differs from that of other historical dramas: hard light was used to give the story a greater resonance and wider than normal lenses were employed to recreate the Duke of York's feelings of constriction. A third technique Hooper employed was the off-centre framing of characters: in his first consultation with Logue, the Duke is captured hunched on the side of a couch at the edge of the frame.