Quotes from Todd Phillips

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!

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'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 really got into filmmaking through photography.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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

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

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.

My dog's a gentleman.

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.'

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.

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. There is this breed of gimmicky documentary that is basically a reality show.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.