A Quote by Todd Phillips

I make decisions to do movies based on the cast. I'd just been working with Zach Galifianakis on 'The Hangover', and I was thinking, I've got to find something to do with this guy immediately.
I'm a huge fan of Zach's [Galifianakis] and I auditioned Zach a million years ago on a movie called Duplex which I was fired from. But Zach came in - It was like 2000, maybe - as a buddy stand-up that people were starting to notice and there was something about him I loved. He wasn't quite right for the part in [Keeping Up with the Joneses] and I got fired anyway, so who cares? But I always wanted to work with Zach.
It's just one of those things like when you're not supposed to laugh, it makes it that much harder to stop laughing. And for some reason Zach [ Galifianakis] and I get in this feedback mood of giggling, and on the set of Hangover we just couldn't get through stuff.
My name is Zach Galifianakis and I hope I'm pronouncing that right. I'm named after my granddad, my middle name. My name is Zach Granddad Galifianakis.
I mean they [ Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis] are both just really good guys and also they're both extremely funny in very unique ways. We made each other laugh an awful lot, and that goes a long way. And we also went through some hard times. I mean it was hard to make this movie [The Hangover].
One of the biggest breaks we had actually, one of the biggest, the hardest I laughed on the movie [The Hangover] was the baby was just doing ridiculous things and making hilarious faces. But I'm sitting there and I'm supposed to be having this exchange with Zach [ Galifianakis] and the baby is like staring at me with these huge eyes and acting, and just making the most cerebral faces, and I could not keep it together.
I'm sort of laughing and so Zach [ Galifianakis] started laughing [on the set of The Hangover]. And Todd [Phillips] was baffled because what we were saying wasn't that funny, you know what I mean? And it was like all the baby's face. So Todd was like, 'What is going on? Get it together guys.'
It's hard not to be the straight man when Zach Galifianakis is there. He's such a delightfully bizarre creature. Everything he does is so surprising. He's such a live wire. It's just so exciting to watch.
When we were not shooting [The Hangover] we were sleeping, so pretty much every waking moment we spent together. And, you know, Bradley [Cooper], Zach [Galifianakis] and I were acquaintances before the movie started but we became good friends very quickly and spent so much time together that it was just inevitable we were either going to really hate each other or really like each other. Thank god it turned out to be the latter.
Zach Galifianakis is a comic force of nature! He is terrific. He digs down here and delivers a beautifully nuanced performance that gets under your skin. Just like the movie.
That is the great thing about policing, you do have a lot of responsibility very early and you have got to make decisions, sometimes life and death decisions, very quickly and there is something about putting a uniform on and thinking 'people are looking to me to make decisions and to look after them' that makes you feel capable.
Even if you're doing something that the studio sends you, or something that's based on a book or story, at the end of it all, you try to make whatever it is your own. This is based on my love of horror movies. Everything is based on something, in some way.
People like Bill Burr and Jim Gaffigan and Zach Galifianakis and Sarah Silverman - they were all amazing and helpful to me.
If you produce yourself and you're working in a band, there's certain compromises everyone has to make, because it's a democracy and you have to cater to each other's feelings. When you have a producer, you have this objective ear that's not worrying about protecting anybody's feelings, so he's just making hard decisions based on what works and what doesn't, which was huge for us. I don't think we'd be able to make those decisions by ourselves.
It's getting harder to make decisions to work for the sake of working. Like everybody, I'm trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply. Sometimes something like The Tourist comes up and it's just fun, but it's not as easy to find projects that I have to do. I have to be home and I have to do other things, but I don't have to work as much.
When you're doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it's most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we're all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.
Zach Galifianakis is hilarious. I worked with him on a pilot before; he's hilarious and such a nice person.
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