Top 35 Todd Phillips Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Todd Phillips

2. “It’s all about escapism. That’s essentially what all movies are about. It’s a vicarious thrill.”

— Todd Phillips

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

— Todd Phillips

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

— Todd Phillips

5. “I was taught that you didn’t want to be part of the group – that it was better to do your own thing.”

— Todd Phillips

6. “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.’”

— Todd Phillips

7. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

8. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

9. “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!”

— Todd Phillips

10. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

11. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

12. “My dog’s a gentleman.”

— Todd Phillips

13. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

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

— Todd Phillips

15. “I love confidence in a guy. I don’t have it, but there’s nothing sexier.”

— Todd Phillips

16. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

17. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

18. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

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

— Todd Phillips

20. “I really got into filmmaking through photography.”

— Todd Phillips

21. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

22. “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.’”

— Todd Phillips

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

— Todd Phillips

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

— Todd Phillips

25. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

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

— Todd Phillips

27. “John Goodman’s pretty dark – I love John Goodman.”

— Todd Phillips

28. “Not every movie has to serve as every audience member’s need for completion.”

— Todd Phillips

29. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

30. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

31. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

32. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

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

— Todd Phillips

34. “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.”

— Todd Phillips

35. “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.”

— Todd Phillips