Todd Phillips

0:15The voice of an angel is breathtaking. Hey, it all ends tonight. Someone needs to burn this place to the ground. Woo! I like that. Well, thanks so much for doing this, Todd. I appreciate it. Thank you for coming. Well, you invite me to Vegas to come see The Hangover. You want to say no? I'm not going to say no to this. And I love, I just love how Bob starts the movie. I know. It's very bizarre. It's such a, I don't want to give anything away, but it's such an opposite spectrum of what's about to happen. Yeah, I know.

1:00It's a perfect... I'm glad you picked up on that. You're wearing chaos moments. Yes. Exactly. It's like happiness and sadness. Was there ever a thought, I mean, talking to people after seeing it, everyone was like, it's a little dark, but I laugh my ass off when that happened. Well, yeah, I'm like you also, you know, but I do realize after the fact, you know, when we do test screenings and things, that some people don't have the same exact sense of humor as me. But to me, yeah, you're laughing at the absurdity of it. You know it didn't really happen. You know you're watching a movie. So you have to put that out of your head and know, and just the absurdity that Alan thought it was a good idea to buy a giraffe. That you can see on the giraffe's face, I think he's saying, wait a minute, someone didn't really think this all the way through. It's a CGI giraffe, I assume. No, the giraffe's real, but he's...

1:45How do you get him to make that look then? We just sat there and you told him, and eventually he's like, what's up with these guys? And you know, it's amazing. When you're creating this film, do you find there's a voice that's easiest to write for? Or would you sit on the crack and look at the work? You know they've all become easy, not that it's easy, but they've all become... The actors have filled in these characters so much over the years that it doesn't write itself, but in some way you just kind of know what the Bradley character would say here. You know what Alan would say here. So it just kind of happens. It's really kind of a fun process. The harder part is the structure and the plot, why this, why that, but the dialogue really kind of just happens. It's a funny t-shirt from Breaking Bad. Yeah man. I almost want my speaker city one.

2:31That's great. That's great. Maybe that'd be too much. I'm talking about the characters though. Is there a process then for the third film where everyone loves the characters? You could put them in any situation. People are going to come see this movie. Yeah. So is there a dilemma or is it easier because of that? No, I mean it's still a dilemma because you wanted to have real stakes and feel real and feel all those things that matter. But I agree with you in that, in that it's very much with these movies. I feel like after that first one, it was such a huge hit, it just felt like people want to spend another two hours with them and that's really what the movies are. It's like, okay, I'll watch them in two hours going through hell again. Okay, I'll watch them for two hours. It's like a TV show, it's like that. You just want to spend more time with the characters. If you keep mentioning the shirt, I'm going to ask you, what do you think happens to Altrui? Do you think he dies, do you think he gets caught? How do you think that ends?

3:16You know Vince Gillian is such a dark guy in such an interesting way and it's a compliment for me that I could see him dying in it. Which no one else would do. But I just feel like the guy is so dark, the creator, and so interesting what he's done with it that I feel like he might go there. Cool, we'll get back to this film because that's what we're here to talk about. I heard you got to control the Bellagio Fountains. You had your hand on the button. Yes, what was the... That was pretty cool, you know? It is kind of an amazing thing because, you know, on the first hangover, we could barely get a hotel to let us stay there, let alone shoot there and take over like we had. And on the third one, you know, the hangover for Las Vegas in 2009, you know, there was a real recession going on. Vegas had a tough summer and when the hangover came out, I remember getting calls from the CEOs of other casinos,

4:04not Caesars, thanking us for making the hangover, for bringing young people back to Vegas. So it really changed. So when we came back and it's like, hey, we need all these properties to kind of cooperate, but they're all competitive properties. Because it was the hangover, they're all kind of came on board, it was pretty amazing. I gotta let you go. So we used something called Five Questions. Five quick questions, one more to answers. Okay, Bangkok or Vegas? Bangkok. Leonard McCartney. You know, it used to be Leonard, but I've watched all these documentaries about him recently and I feel like he was kind of a jerk. I know it's crazy, so I'm gonna go to McCartney. Okay, writing or directing? Directing. What are you all under Mel Brooks? Mel Brooks. And in one word, the hangover three. Mayhem. Can you remember me? I'm the one that picked the object.

4:50It's Sarah, can you remember me? I wanna pick the object. No! We've been on a lot of adventures together, but it seems like you haven't learned anything. Anything. I'll be in the limo.