Todd Phillips Quotations

I never had a ton of male friends and it's always been something that's really interesting to me, what brings guys together? The bonding. 'Old School' is a good example of that. And even 'Starsky' and even 'Road Trip.'

'The Hangover' was lightening in a bottle. We're aware of that. It went through the roof all over the world.

Bangkok, like Las Vegas, sounds like a place where you make bad decisions.

There's a darkness under 'The Hangover' because ultimately there's a missing person and it's not really that funny. There's a sort of darkness under it that I love, and still people are laughing as hard if not harder than they did in 'Old School.'

The worst thing you can do as a comedy director is be on set and think of something ridiculous, or an actor comes up to you with something ridiculous, and you say 'No, no that's too much.' Let's not worry if that's too much, let's shoot it, and then decide if that's too much when we see it.

I think that 'Hangover II' is as funny as 'The Hangover I,' honest to God, but I think that it's a little bit darker, and the stakes are a little bit higher.

I'd love to do a movie with females in it, and not necessarily the female version of 'The Hangover,' but I'd love to. If I did it it'd star Juliette Lewis, because she's the funniest woman in the world. She's my favorite actress on the planet. If we did a character-based comedy about women, I don't see it out of my range.

Directors tend to be more underrated than overrated because it's a quiet job and people don't really understand it.

It's all about escapism. That's essentially what all movies are about. It's a vicarious thrill.

It's heartbreaking when you hear a kid buying a ticket for... I don't know, whatever movie you're up against. And you see them sneaking into your film. It's just heartbreaking. But in the spirit of full disclosure, that is what I did as an 11-year-old sneaking into 'Stripes.'

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape.

Comedies are just never that expensive quite frankly. They really aren't. We aren't doing green screen shooting, so even Hangover II in Bangkok might seem like it's expensive, you're flying over and back, but they're just not that expensive to make when you do it the way we do it which is very focused and I've done it before.

I find I like to work with a lot of the same actors, because I find that there's sort of shorthand there, and there is this unspoken trust, both ways. They trust me and I trust them. And I know what I'm going to get from them, to an extent. It's just fun, kind of creating this little family.

I was taught that you didn't want to be part of the group - that it was better to do your own thing.

Comedy is so subjective. You could be in a room with 400 people laughing at a joke and you could just not think it's funny. You're just sitting there like, 'Am I in the twilight zone? Why is everyone laughing?' It's such a personal thing. People have such a personal visceral response to comedy.

I think comedy directors tend to feel a need to justify the bad behavior, and I just never think that. I like bad behavior, I've always liked bad behavior, I'm a fan of bad behavior, and I don't think you have to justify bad behavior.

There's a punk-rock attitude, clearly, to 'Hated.' There's even a punk-rock attitude to 'The Hangover,' I think. We start the movie with a Glenn Danzig song.

You know, if I started worrying about what the critics think, I'd never make another comedy. You couldn't pick a less funny group than critics - you couldn't find a more bitter group of people!

I got nominated for an Academy Award(R) for writing 'Borat.'

I think people like comedies and I think concept driven comedies seem to be working when it's a clear concept and you deliver funny stuff.

All my movies, as I get the ability to do it, they tend to go a little darker, a little darker.

I don't have a horror film in me just because I don't like to be scared. But I definitely have a documentary in me, and I certainly have dramas.

I just love the look of film. But I have nothing against HD.

John Goodman's pretty dark - I love John Goodman.

Where teams score on us is when they score easy baskets. (Wheat is) very talented with the ball in his hands, but we're trying to bring him along in his mind. These kids are all we've got and they're going to keep giving effort and heart. Maybe the learning on the fly will translate into some rapid growth.

There are movie sites that love movies and there are movie sites that are just bitter people that just hate movies. I find Movieline to be in the latter. The tone is bizarrely hateful.

When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.

I think any filmmaker looks back and thinks, 'Boy, if we only had four hours more on that day when the sun was going down,' or, 'If we only spent more time and went back.'

We never even talked about that we were going to be a band. David was the first person I went to see and that was the end of my trip. I got to play with everyone right there in his living room. The immersion was so deep, so fast. Suddenly, I was dogpaddling on mandolin.

When I was younger I didn't really know what a director did: I knew I loved movies and I figured the actors made it up! And then when you get to 12 years old you start thinking, What does a director do? It was really an organic beginning: this looks like something I want to do, I can't believe people get paid to do it!

With comedy especially, it feels like such a clear-cut thing to be a writer-director. There is so much nuance and tone in a comedy that it's hard to contextualise it in a script.

Brandon Wheat is a sophomore and probably the best raw talent we have at the guard position. I've told everybody that (the kinds of struggles we've had) happen and that we're capable of playing better than we have played. We have eight of our last 12 at home (beginning with last Friday) and the kids are resilient and working hard.

A little bit nuts, a little too intense.

That record changed everything. I don't know how aware of that we were at the time. I guess later we realized that.

Each of us had to find a role to play. That's what evolved out of the hours and hours of hard work. We designed a way to have a five-way conversation. It was a lot of hard work but it all came kind of naturally.

It's different because you don't have anyone to look up to see how to do things. You gotta make everything new ourselves.

I'm first and foremost a company man, surprising as that is. I love Warner Brothers. That's where I have a deal. That's where I've been for years. So I don't really interact too much with other studios and do things with other studios and I don't necessarily read scripts from other studios.

I'm not a huge fan of 3-D, though. Honestly, I think that movies are an immersive experience and an audience experience. There's nothing like seeing a film with 500 people in a theater. And there's something about putting on 3-D glasses that makes it a very singular experience for me. Suddenly I'm not connected to the audience anymore.

I knew that it was special. That feeling was in the air, maybe it was just in our heads. From the first song, the crowd just went ape shit.

I know Doug pretty well. I think we both got pretty lucky. Everybody was (unhappy with the drawing format), but two teams with a combined four wins were pretty happy. And from our point of view, we've actually been playing pretty well.

In the second half, we knew we had to come out and take better shots, drive to the basket ?cause it was hard for them to guard us straight up, man-to-man. So we took advantage of it.

I tend to make movies about my peer group. I couldn't see myself now going back and making a movie about a bunch of college kids, necessarily. I kind of always operate in the things I'm observing around me, whether it's friends having babies now in my life or what have you.

Music is just one of the tools a director has with which to paint and I think it's one of the most effective.

I think a lot of American comedies tend to apologize for their bad behavior in the last 10 minutes of the movie.

It becomes pretty crystal clear once you watch that first assembly [movie cut] the things that are just grinding it to a halt, so to speak, or slowing it down, or getting in the way, yeah.

You know, because you outline a movie, it kinda comes at the same time. I mean, there are days when you are just concentrating on 'ok, let's worry about just comedy today,' and there are days when you're like 'you know what, we gotta just beef up the story.'. But, it's not like process wise it's that technically separate. One informs the other, so they kinda all happen together ideally.

I grew up raised by my mom and my two sisters, so I never had a real male influence in my life. I never really understood heterosexual male relationships.

There's such an awkwardness to most heterosexual male relationships. You see women who are friends, and they kiss each other good-bye, and they're just so much warmer with each other. But there's this thing with guys where, even between best friends, there's a standoffishness.

To make a movie about mayhem, sometimes you have to go to mayhem.

I love confidence in a guy. I don't have it, but there's nothing sexier.

I make decisions to do movies based on the cast. I'd just been working with Zach [Galifianakis] on The Hangover, and I was thinking, I've got to find something to do with this guy immediately.

I just thinks it's interesting what it takes an actor to find their characters through the wardrobe, or the hair, or the way a character walks.

When I was younger I was obsessed with 'Star 80,' and it's just a great movie - I think I saw it three times in the theater.

When I was in NYU Film School I drove a taxi in New York for two years, I felt like I owned my own business with that little taxi.

Well, it's so cheesy to say but you can't find a comedy director who makes movies for critics. When a movie does $580 million worldwide, I'm not saying that proves anything except people were enjoying the experience.

I'm not worried about young people seeing an opportunity and taking advantage of it.

I really got into filmmaking through photography.

I think reviewers have become particularly venomous because, in a way, the power has been sucked from them. A 15-year-old can write a review on the Internet and it means as much as Roger Ebert's review, and that just makes Roger Ebert mad, so he comes out harder and stronger.

My dog's a gentleman.

How many days do you have that are just purely dramatic? How many days do you have that are just purely comedic? It's usually a combination and I think that's what real life feels like.

Not every movie has to serve as every audience member's need for completion.

You're only as good as your body of work, and everybody has issues, whether it's Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. I'm not comparing myself to those guys, but you learn more from the misses than the hits.

My movies before tend to be just funny. But it wasn't a conscious thing I was looking for at all.

I take it very seriously, music. I think it's one of the tools that a director has with which to kind of paint. The right music can sometimes do five pages of scripted dialogue.

I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.

I feel like movies when they work they'll find an audience.

I like - there's a better word for it, but I like the danger that a comic brings to a role. It has a feeling, even though everything's scripted and everything's planned what you're going to do. When I see Will Ferrell or Sacha Baron Cohen, there's a feeling that anything could happen.

Every weekend in history has worked for movies if the movie connects.

You set the tone on the set that you want to see in the film.

What it boils down to is that when you say the word Las Vegas it means something. You could say New York City and it doesn't really mean anything. When you say a word like Bangkok, in my mind it means something. There's not a lot of cities where the world literally brings a picture to your mind.