In 1993, while still a 22-year-old NYU film student, Todd Phillips made a documentary about possibly the most notorious, most disgusting punk singer of all time. Hated: GG Allin & The Murder Junkies found Phillips slumming it with Allin as the latter did what he was best at: getting wasted, getting naked, starting fights, flinging faeces. Then, with the film in the can, Phillips set up a premiere at the university.
“GG had got out of jail three days before,” remembers Phillips. “He showed up drunk as fuck, with three 40-ounces [bottles] on him, and he’s sitting at the back yelling at the screen. Thirty minutes in, someone in the film talks shit about him and GG throws a 40-ounce at the screen and, of course, it hits a woman in the head and cuts her open. She’s bleeding, the movie gets shut down, the police come, GG leaves and that was the premiere of Hated. It seemed like an omen for my career.”
For a while Phillips was right: he followed Hated with Frat House, another disgusting documentary that lifted the lid on fraternity fun and found Phillips, in an attempt to gain the trust of his subjects, locked in a dog cage while they threw beer and ash on him. But soon his luck improved. He crossed over to fiction, revisiting frat houses for the Will Ferrell-starring Old School, as well as remaking Starsky And Hutch, starring Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, and directing the Hangover films.
Thanks to that stag-do trilogy, Phillips became one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy directors – together the films earned £1.4bn. His latest, though, tackles meatier material. War Dogs is based on a true story about Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller), two twentysomething potheads-turned-arms dealers who, in 2007, got a $300m Department of Defense contract to sell weapons for US-backed militias in Afghanistan. The Pentagon needed the weaponry that was left over from the cold war and hidden around Europe, so paid sanctioned proxies such as Diveroli and Packouz to buy them on the down low. For Phillips, who had read about the story in a 2011 Rolling Stone article, the subject matter resonated.
“Dead Kennedys sang about it,” he says. “That’s what I grew up on. It’s such bullshit they sell people, that war is about protecting your freedom, but meanwhile people are making billions and billions of dollars. It’s like, ‘Fuck this, the system is rigged.’ The system is set up for the rich to get richer and everybody else to stay where they are. It’s a really depressing reality, and the more you can shine a light on it through movies and articles and books, the better it is.” And besides, he says, “It just felt like, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do the 23-year-old Jewish version of Scarface?’”
He admires how ballsy the War Dogs leads were in real life. Despite their unscrupulous exploits, these two underdogs took on the government and, until they started cutting corners, won big-time. “To me the guys are heroes,” says Phillips. “The government knew that they couldn’t source 100m rounds of AK ammo in the middle of a drought after two Iraq wars. So they went to these two kids knowing they were gonna source it in a shady way, and as long as nobody knows, wink wink we’re cool. For me the film is an indictment on the US government and their process of procurement, and the guys are kind of awesome.”
He enthuses about Miles Teller’s everyman performance, but gushes about Hill’s arrogant, giggling swagger. “He can singlehandedly change the tone of a film with his energy and his exuberance,” he says. “Look at every Martin Scorsese movie, then look at Wolf Of Wall Street – it stands out so differently. I had read that script out of curiosity before they made the movie, and it wasn’t what the movie was. To go in and tonally shift a Marty/Leo movie? He’s an electric actor and I was always dying to work with him. I’d tried to get Jonah to be in The Hangover.” In the Zack Galifianakis part? “Yeah. But Jonah didn’t want to do it, which I respect and still harbour resentment towards.” He laughs. “I’m kidding. He was concentrating on dramatic roles, he didn’t wanna just be a comedy guy.”
In that context, it makes sense for Hill to have instead gone for War Dogs, which is decidedly more dramatic than Phillips’s previous features; the Hangover films especially – or at least the first two – were wild comedies, in which Galifianakis got tasered by a child and Ed Helms woke up with a Mike Tyson facial tattoo. Phillips says he’d been heading in a more dramatic direction, getting darker and more serious with each film – he’s currently exec-producing an HBO series about the rise of Islamic State. The signs had started to show by the third Hangover. Its drama eclipsed the comedy, offering up rehab and murder. “Hangover 3, I know it gets a bad rap, but that’s because people wanted it to be slip-on-a-banana-peel funny, and we really tried to jump genres with it,” he says. “It’s fucking dark. Maybe it was too much.
War Dogs, while not an out-and-out comedy, is still funny and raucous. Phillips calls it “tonally bizarre” saying that “people expect a sort of baggage with my name and Jonah’s name, and they get this other thing that still has its foot in the initial thing.” They do. After a tense chase scene in Baghdad, for example, one US soldier is agog that the pair “drove through the infamous ‘triangle of death’”. “We drive through all triangles,” replies Hill’s Diveroli, “including your mom’s.”
But the line that can be drawn through all of Phillips’s films, from Hated to The Hangover to War Dogs, is that his lead characters expose and sympathise with the weaknesses of the adult male. In Diveroli and Packouz’s case, their greed ends up getting the better of them. “These movies are a celebration of the bad decisions men tend to make,” he says of his oeuvre. “And we make bad decisions all the time.” Just ask Tony Montana.
War Dogs is in cinemas on Friday
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