Interview

Todd Phillips, second from right, and the cast of The Hangover

Bro-comedy maestro Todd Phillips (Old School, Road Trip) has made plenty of films about men being boys. In The Hangover, a trio of bachelor-party survivors played by Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zack Galifianakis try to piece together what happened during a disastrous night in Las Vegas. (Hint: it involved some spontaneous dentistry and a chicken.)

Denying widespread rumors that a sequel is in the works, Philips (who also co-wrote Borat) sat down with Interview to explain why women loves his movies and why Vegas is a risky place to put up a film crew.

Darrell Hartman: Everyone's been reporting that you've already got a sequel in the works. True?

Todd Phillips:  Ah, no. These rumors start on this thing called the Internet. Apparently, some fat kid in Tampa can just write something and it becomes true. Warner Brothers, I think, would be into doing it if the movie works financially. But there's not a greenlit sequel.

DH: Did you always envision this as a Vegas movie?
TP: The Hangover sounds really clichéd on paper. "It's a bachelor-party movie." But really, it's not that-you never see the bachelor party. It's really about the fallout of bad decisions, and nowhere do you make more bad decisions than in Las Vegas. I think they should change their slogan: "Every minute, another bad decision is being made here."

DH: And this is about a bunch of guys who make a whole bunch in a single night-but can't remember any of them.

TP: Yeah, I describe it as Memento for retarded guys.

DH: The Bourne Identity with morons.

TP: Right! Stillborn Identity. Let's see who else we can offend.

DH: In some ways, this is as much a detective story as a comedy.

TP: That was the appealing part.  Doing a bachelor-party movie didn't necessary feel like super growth for me, but the structure and the storytelling were exciting-that mystery element, people trying solve it. There's always these slow moments in comedies where you lose the audience. And in this film we don't, because they're actually genuinely interested: "How did that baby get there?"

DH: And you wait until the closing credits to show what happened that night.

TP: I think that's one of the great parts of the movie-the third act happens during the credit roll. Comedies don't generally have very satisfying third acts. They don't have endings-they just stop. And I go on record as saying this might be the most satisfying, craziest credits sequence in a comedy. I defy one person to name the second [assistant director].

DH: The old-fashioned definition of comedy is a story that ends with a marriage. But here, and in Old School, you seem to prefer stories that begin with one.

TP: Yeah—it's where you start to unravel, when you get married and realize, "What have I done?" Marriage is a traumatic time for guys—and girls too.  It really represents that moment in life where you're choosing between responsibility and irresponsibility.

DH: Are you married?

TP: I'm not. But I have been engaged. I don't have a fear of marriage; I just think it represents a really unhinged time in people's lives. Awkwardness is great to mine for comedy-awkwardness and pressures.

DH: How was it shooting in Vegas?

TP: I actually thought it was going to be more difficult than it was. Bur Las Vegas is a gateway city. It's full of temptation. "Some people can't handle Vegas"-that's the tagline of the movie. It came from the tagline of our crew.

DH: How do you mean?

TP: I think people can live in Vegas and have functional lives, but when you're there in a hotel casino, living on the strip, the options on the off-days are pretty rough-especially for the crew guys. It's very expensive to go to the spa at Caesar's. It's less expensive to play video poker and chase whores. So we literally had wives showing up, taking their husbands and putting them in rehab. And you'd be going, "Hey, where'd that driver go, so-and-so?" "Uh...he's, uh...we got a new guy."

DH: There's a pivotal scene that involves card-counting. Did that make your hosts uneasy?

TP: No, no, no. They shot a whole movie, 21, about that.  Vegas welcomes you to try and count cards.

DH: I guess for every person who succeeds...

TP: There's 500,000 guys who drop their entire Christmas bonus attempting to pull it off. You need to have a mind to do it. I mean, know what it is, but I smoke way too much pot to keep track of three cards, let alone six decks.

DH: Who were your comedic influences?

TP: I like to pretend I grew up on Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, but the truth is I grew up watching The Jerk and Stripes and Blues Brothers.  And I think this movie harkens [back] to those movies: it's guys on a mission. At the core, there's love between the guys. They give each other a hard time, but you know they're real friends. I think Judd Apatow does that really well-sometimes overly sentimental for my taste, but when you watch his movies, you know they love each other.

DH: It's not as convincing when a movie shows friends being friendly.

TP: Right. You're never nice to your friends. You're nice to people you don't like!

DH: The Zach Galifianakis character is kind of in his own world. What was it like working with him?

TP: No one does left-footed better than Zack. I think he's the funniest guy out there right now-like, Andy Kaufman-esque brilliance. I'd been following his stand-up in LA for years and I always thought, "God, I'd love to find a role for this guy."  But his act is so not-translatable. He's not up there telling jokes. It's like performance art. He's had bit parts in certain movies, but he tends to disappear because his stuff is so subtle.

DH: Whose idea was it to put him in a jock strap?

TP: That was Zack. And of course he always regrets it. He loves to say, "I gotta learn not to suggest things, because Todd will do anything." Like masturbating the baby. We had a doll that would stand in for the baby... and so I'm just talking to the cinematographer and all of a sudden Zack goes, "Hey Todd, check it out." And I look over and he's got the doll's baby hand and he's pretending the doll's masturbating. So I laugh for 5 minutes, because I'm 14 years old. Then I go, "We're putting that in the movie." And he goes, "No, I'm not doing that in a movie! It might not even be legal!" I go, "I'll deal with the parents."

DH: What's taboo in comedy now?

TP: I'd be the wrong person to ask. You never rein it in on the set; you always do everything. You're basically documenting mayhem. There's only certain crew people that can handle that sort of, "Oh, we changed it, we're not doing that anymore, we're gonna jerk the baby off." And then in the editing room you kind of figure it out. For me, if it's funny, it's not really offensive.

DH: And you don't worry about alienating the female audience?

TP: Women love this movie as much as guys, which confounds me.  One of the reviewers told me women loved Old School. She said, "You're pulling back a curtain on a uniquely male event, fraternities." And I think The Hangover is the same thing, this ritual male behavior. Women have never really been invited to that.

DH: And in both, you confirm their worst fears.

TP: That's right.