Todd Phillips Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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

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

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.

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape. There is this breed of gimmicky documentary that is basically a reality show.

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.

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

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.

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

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.'

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 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.'

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.'

I really got into filmmaking through photography.

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.