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shot that!’ But after seven studio films I’ve gotten much better at covering my ass in shooting and getting the right coverage. It’s funny, but with comedy people assume you just improvise a lot, but we don’t do that. I try to shoot it cinematically and make it look like a movie. I think a lot of comedies just look like TV shows.” POST: You re-teamed with editor Debra Neil-Fisher, who cut the first Hangover and Due Date, and also used Mike Sale who did Bridesmaids and Superbad. Tell us about the editing process? PHILLIPS: “I’d never used two editors before, but I did here because of the short post schedule.They’re both great with com- edy rhythms and we just divided up the reels and I went back and forth between them.They didn’t come on location, but they started cutting right away and sent me scenes and I’d email back notes, because the 16-hour time difference was pretty brutal. We cut on Avid (Media Composer 4 with and HD workflow). I cut my first film, Hated, a documentary, on film but I’d never go back. I understand why certain directors still love to cut film, but I was a student of digital edit- ing, so that’s my world. I even bought an Avid on my second documentary Frat House, and taught myself how to use it.” POST: How many VFX shots are there? PHILLIPS: “There’s only about150 shots, and most of them are removal and clean up. Hammerhead and Invisible Effects did them all, and Robert Stadd set all that up and they were great.” POST: You heard that PETA are very upset because the monkey smokes heavily in the movie? PHILLIPS: (Laughs) “I know, but the cig- arettes are fake and all the smoke is digital. I joked that the hardest thing in the shoot was teaching the monkey to smoke, and they freaked out.” POST: The old Hollywood cliché is, never ever work with kids or animals.You obviously don’t give a damn. PHILLIPS: (Laughs) “You’re right, I do it all the time, and I don’t agree with that. I find that they bring so much when you can play against them and not treat them the way you’d normally treat them in the real world. My favorite scene is when they drop the monkey off at the vet hospital.” POST: What was that the most difficult ef- fects shot to pull off? PHILLIPS: “It’s always some of the basic stuff, like sky replacement, because it was cloudy one day.We kept going back to some of those shots, which can be very tricky, and they ended up looking really digital, so we’d try it again. Some of the driving stuff was basic greenscreen, but we did as much as possible as practical effects.We used quite a bit of in-camera timelapse photography for the opening credits and some of the flash- back stuff.” POST: You collaborated again with com- poser Christophe Beck, who did Hangover,Due Date and School for Scoundrels. How impor- tant are sound and music to you? PHILLIPS: “It’s so important to me, and music in particular is one of those tools that a director has with which to paint a scene. It’s so effective and one great music cue can sometimes do the job of five pages of dia- logue.Tone is really what a director’s main job is. You’re the purveyor of tone, and nothing helps you more with tone than a great music track, so from the start the music tells you this is a fucked-up comedy. It’s going to get dark.We did the whole mix at Warners with a great crew — sound de- signer Cameron Frankley, sound mixer Petur Hiddal — and I’m picky about the mix, but only to a point.You can easily start to get dead ears and over-analyze it all.The very short schedule benefited us.We could- n’t go on and on.” POST: Did you do a DI? PHILLIPS: “Yes, at Technicolor (with Jill Bogdanowicz on Resolve). I only began DIs on the first Hangover. Before that we did normal color timing, which I love.The great thing about a DI is that you can go in and surgically fix anything, and if you have a great DP like I do — Larry Sher, who shot the first one and Due Date for me — you don’t get lost in the maze of possibilities and end up having it all look too fake. Sometimes I see these full-DI movies and I’m like, ‘What?’ They got totally carried away in the DI of it all. Everything with me is about having all the comedy play off real- ity so I try to make it all look as real as pos- sible, including the DI process.” POST: Any interest in shooting 3D? PHILLIPS: “I have an issue with 3D — in comedies. It’s so much about the audience experience, the room environment, hitting your friend’s elbow and so on. But I find with 3D and the glasses it becomes a very singu- lar experience for me. I don’t turn to my friend and we’re laughing at the same thing. Suddenly I’m watching it alone. Now that works for a movie like Avatar. I loved getting immersed in that whole world and experi- ence, but comedy is different. Jackass was a 3D movie, which worked, but generally I don’t think it suits comedy.” POST: You also produced this under your Green Hat Films banner. Do you like producing? PHILLIPS: “I like doing my own films, but I don’t love producing. It’s not a goal of mine to put out five movies a year. Green Hat really exists as a development com- pany for my own projects. “I am also producing this movie Project X right now, with another director, but I have no real interest in spreading myself too thin with outside projects.Writing and directing are my main things.” POST: What’s next? PHILLIPS: “For the first time, I honestly don’t know yet. I did both Hangovers and Due Date in barely two and a half years. I’m exhausted. So I really need time off to recharge.” www.postmagazine.com June 2011 • Post 13 VFX supervisor Robert Stadd helped the production get ahead of the game in Bangkok with greenscreen shots like this one.