a big decision. The risks were legion but the stakes needed to be high. The film's structure is slight. Our constant fear was that the climax would not be climactic enough. But here is something Colin doesn't understand. On the first day of shooting, I had an extraordinary experience. We had to set the level of the stammer. When I pushed Colin towards making his stammer more severe, I was profoundly moved. It was intensely dramatic and powerful. I knew we were not running the risks we had envisaged. We had looked at archive footage from the 1938 Glasgow Empire exhibition -- a long clip with decent close-ups of the King. What was so moving is that you can see the King wants to do the right thing. There is hope in his eyes. There is nothing subversive about him. And he keeps hitting these silences in which he starts to drown, then pauses, recovers himself, goes again... and drowns again. I had tears in my eyes at the end of the five-minute, juddery clip. I thought: my God, if it can be this emotional and we can somehow catch the spirit of this, we are not going to have a problem. Was the King's stammer as calamitous as the film makes out? TH: I think so. We don't know what he was like in private. CF: And we don't have recordings of what he was like before he met Lionel Logue. But we do have accounts of his Wembley