TODD PHILLIPS

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.