In the 2000s, Hooper directed the major BBC costume dramas Love in a Cold Climate (2001) and Daniel Deronda (2002), as well as the 2003 revival of ITV's Prime Suspect series.

He followed up with the musical epic Les Misérables (2012), and the romantic drama The Danish Girl (2015), the later of which was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.

I could only afford a hundred feet of Kodachrome reversal film, which cost about twenty-five [pounds], and you had to send off for two weeks to be processed.

[8] The short starred Hooper's brother as a boy who discovers a bomber jacket and a photograph hidden in a cupboard and learns his grandfather died in World War II.

[n 2][8] Hooper finished school aged 16, then wrote the script for his first professional short film, entitled Painted Faces.

He spent the next two years raising capital for the short by courting advertisement directors, whose financial dominance during the late 1980s was noticed by Hooper.

[6][11] He joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where he directed Kate Beckinsale in A View from the Bridge and Emily Mortimer in The Trial.

[13][14][n 3] Hooper has also directed commercials including an ad for Jaguar with Tom Hiddleston, Ben Kingsley, and Mark Strong, which aired during Super Bowl XLV.

[6][20] Hooper directed several EastEnders episodes between 1998 and 2000, two of which were hour-long specials that represented the soap when it won the British Academy Television Award for Best Soap Opera in 2000 and 2001;[6] the first was the episode in which Carol Jackson (Lindsey Coulson) learns her daughter Bianca (Patsy Palmer) had an affair with her fiancé Dan Sullivan (Craig Fairbrass).

[12] He was influenced in his early career by the cinematic style of American TV series such as ER, NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street and tried to work that style into his EastEnders episodes; one scene featuring Grant Mitchell (Ross Kemp) involved a crane shot, which Hooper believes made him infamous among the EastEnders production crew.

Granada's head of drama Andy Harries introduced Hooper to Mirren, who persuaded him to take the job by promising that he could make the serial his own way.

[27][28] Hooper made his debut as a feature film director with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission drama Red Dust (2004), which stars Hilary Swank, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jamie Bartlett.

The film was not widely seen, which Hooper attributed to media coverage of torture during the Iraq War: "When I started making it you could watch the movie with a wonderful sense of 'we'd never do it in our own country…they're the horrible people but it's not us.'

"[23] The premiere of the film in the United Kingdom came on BBC Two in 2005, making it eligible for the BAFTA Television Awards; it was nominated in the Best Single Drama category at the 2006 ceremony.

More significantly, by using chunks of original television footage, they painted a stark picture of the zealotry of a vengeful nation and its press over the supposed embodiment of evil.

Hooper had been working on a biographical film with Joan Didion about Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, since 2006 when he was asked by Hanks to helm the programme.

[36] He worked on the miniseries for a total of 16 months; principal photography lasted 110 days on locations in the United States, France, England and Hungary and he controlled a $100 million budget.

[41] The wake of John Adams' Emmy wins brought offers to Hooper from studios to direct spy and comic book films, which he declined.

He cast Timothy Spall as Clough's assistant Peter Taylor, Colm Meaney as Don Revie and Jim Broadbent as Derby County chairman Sam Longson.

[23] Hooper cast Colin Firth as George VI and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue and spent three weeks with the actors reading the script and rehearsing.

[61][62] Adapted from the musical, the film starred Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Eddie Redmayne.

"[64] Unlike other musical films, Les Misérables features the actors singing live on camera, rather than miming to backing vocals.

Hooper told Los Angeles Times that he thought there was a "slightly strange falseness" when he saw musical films where the actors sang to recordings.

It loosely tells the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people to undergo sex reassignment surgery, and wife Gerda Wegener.

[74] Hooper identifies research as being key to his process of directing period dramas such as John Adams to make the scenes authentic.

[76] Hooper and Smith have worked together on Cold Feet, Love in a Cold Climate, Prime Suspect, Red Dust and Elizabeth I. Hooper also uses uncommon framing techniques to emphasise story; in John Adams, he wanted to imply American independence seemed unlikely during the Revolutionary War, so he used "a very rough camera style—almost all hand held, wide lenses close to the actors, lots of movement, many cameras shooting at once so there was often not a settled master "point of view", and lots of unmatching Dutch tilts so the horizon lines of the frame were often being thrown off.

[74] Similarly, in The Damned United, Hooper began to experiment with using wide-angle lenses and putting actors in the extreme edges of the frame.

[74][77] Another frequently used technique is Hooper's tendency to use a variety of focal length camera lenses to distort the resulting picture.

[78] Hooper said the use of this method in the first consulting room scene served to "suggest the awkwardness and tension of Logue and Bertie's first meeting".

[74] Following the release of Cats, reports came from the film's visual effects departments of Hooper's "hurtful", "horrible", "disrespectful" and "demeaning attitude" towards them and their work.