Todd Phillips

Todd Phillips
Born	Todd Philip Bunzl 12/19/1970
Birthplace	New York City, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Filmmaker, screenwriter, producer
Known for	The Hangover trilogy, Joker
Awards	Golden Lion (2019)

Todd Phillips (born Todd Philip Bunzl; December 19, 1970) is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. After beginning his career in documentary filmmaking in the early 1990s, Phillips became one of the most commercially successful directors of studio comedies in the 2000s, helming Road Trip (2000), Old School (2003), Starsky & Hutch (2004), and School for Scoundrels (2006). His standing in Hollywood expanded substantially with The Hangover (2009) and its two sequels, which together became among the highest-grossing R-rated comedy releases in cinema history.

In 2019, Phillips made a pronounced shift in tone with Joker, a psychological thriller based on the DC Comics character that he co-wrote with Scott Silver and directed. The film premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival, where it received the Golden Lion, and went on to receive eleven Academy Award nominations, including three for Phillips personally: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. These followed his earlier Oscar nomination for co-writing Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). Phillips reunited with star Joaquin Phoenix for the 2024 sequel Joker: Folie à Deux.

Early Life

Todd Phillips was born Todd Philip Bunzl on December 19, 1970, in New York City. He was raised in a Jewish family on Long Island. In interviews, Phillips has described an upbringing in suburban New York that he later contrasted with the downtown punk and underground scenes that drew his attention as a teenager and shaped his earliest filmmaking interests.

From an early age, Phillips gravitated toward film as a medium. He has cited his enrollment at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts as the formal entry point into his career, although he did not complete his degree. By the time he was in his early twenties, he had already begun work on his first feature, a documentary about the New York punk-rock provocateur GG Allin.

Education

Phillips attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the early 1990s, where he studied film. According to subsequent interviews, he left the program before graduating, in part because the documentary he had begun shooting while a student — Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies — became a feature-length project that he sold and released independently. The proceeds and attention from that film allowed him to continue working in the industry without returning to complete his coursework.

Career

Early documentaries (1993–1998)

Phillips made his feature debut with Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies (1993), a documentary that chronicled the final years of the transgressive punk performer GG Allin. The film was made while Phillips was still a student at NYU and developed a cult following on the festival and home-video circuit, providing him with industry visibility unusual for a first-time filmmaker in his early twenties.

He followed it with Frat House (1998), a documentary about fraternity hazing co-directed with Andrew Gurland. The film won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. Frat House was scheduled to air on HBO but was ultimately shelved after questions were raised about whether portions of it had been re-staged, a controversy that became part of Phillips's early professional record. A subsequent documentary, Bittersweet Motel (2000), followed the rock band Phish on tour.

Studio comedies (2000–2008)

Phillips transitioned from documentary to mainstream comedy with Road Trip (2000), a DreamWorks release starring Breckin Meyer, Seann William Scott, and Tom Green. The film, which Phillips co-wrote, was a commercial success and established a template — ensemble male protagonists in escalating misadventures — that would recur throughout his subsequent work.

He followed it with Old School (2003), starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, and Vince Vaughn as adult men who attempt to recreate fraternity life. The film became a defining title of the early-2000s American comedy revival and remains among Phillips's most quoted works. He next directed Starsky & Hutch (2004), a feature adaptation of the 1970s television series pairing Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson.

In 2006, Phillips co-wrote Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the Sacha Baron Cohen mockumentary directed by Larry Charles. The screenplay, credited to Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, Dan Mazer, and Phillips, received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 79th Academy Awards. That same year, Phillips directed School for Scoundrels, a remake of the 1960 British comedy, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Heder.

The Hangover trilogy (2009–2013)

The Hangover (2009), released by Warner Bros., centered on a group of friends piecing together the events of a chaotic bachelor party in Las Vegas. Starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, and Justin Bartha, the film was a substantial critical and commercial success and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. The Broadcast Film Critics Association also named it Best Comedy at the 15th Critics' Choice Awards.

The film's success made Phillips one of the most bankable comedy directors in Hollywood, and he proceeded to direct two sequels: The Hangover Part II (2011), set in Thailand, and The Hangover Part III (2013), which concluded the trilogy. Together the three films grossed several billion dollars worldwide. During production of the sequels, Phillips also expanded his role as a producer, taking on credits for films directed by others, including Project X (2012) and the 2014 ensemble comedy Due Date-adjacent productions tied to his Green Hat Films banner.

Between the second and third Hangover films, Phillips directed Due Date (2010), a road-trip comedy starring Robert Downey Jr. and Galifianakis, and would later move away from broad comedy entirely.

Transition to drama: War Dogs (2016)

In 2016, Phillips directed and co-wrote War Dogs, a fact-based dramatic comedy starring Jonah Hill and Miles Teller as young arms dealers who secure a U.S. military contract during the Iraq War. The film, adapted from a Rolling Stone article, marked a deliberate move toward more dramatic material and tonally darker storytelling, prefiguring the work he would undertake on his next project.

Joker (2019)

Joker, co-written by Phillips and Scott Silver and directed by Phillips, was released by Warner Bros. in October 2019. Starring Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a failed stand-up comedian whose descent into violence transforms him into the Batman villain known as the Joker, the film was conceived as a stand-alone character study set outside the broader DC Extended Universe.

The film premiered at the 76th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion, the festival's top prize. Joker grossed more than one billion dollars worldwide, becoming the first R-rated film to do so. At the 92nd Academy Awards, it received eleven nominations, the most of any film that year. Phillips personally received three nominations: Best Picture (as producer), Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay (shared with Silver). Phoenix won Best Actor, and Hildur Guðnadóttir won Best Original Score.

Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

Phillips returned to the character with Joker: Folie à Deux (2024), again co-written with Silver and starring Phoenix alongside Lady Gaga as Harleen Quinzel. Structured in part as a musical and centered on Fleck's trial and incarceration at Arkham State Hospital, the sequel was met with substantially weaker commercial and critical reception than its predecessor. In subsequent interviews and statements, Phillips defended the creative choices behind the sequel, citing influences distinct from those of the first film. Warner Bros. executives continued to publicly defend the film into 2026, with studio leadership characterizing its reception as more negative than the work warranted.

Production company

Phillips operates through his production company, Green Hat Films, established during the run of The Hangover trilogy. Under the banner he has produced films including Project X (2012), in addition to his directorial output. Green Hat has maintained a first-look arrangement with Warner Bros. through most of Phillips's tenure as a director at the studio.

Personal Life

Phillips has generally maintained a low public profile regarding his personal life. He has spoken in interviews about his roots in New York City and his early immersion in the city's underground music and film cultures, which he has identified as formative influences on his sensibility as a filmmaker. He is reported to be a collector of contemporary art, an interest that has been noted in feature profiles tied to the release of Joker.

Phillips changed his surname professionally from Bunzl to Phillips early in his career. He has not publicly discussed marriage or children in detail, and biographical references generally limit themselves to confirmed professional matters.

Recognition

Phillips has received four Academy Award nominations across two films. His first nomination came at the 79th Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, shared with his co-writers, for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006). At the 92nd Academy Awards, he received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Joker (2019), the latter again shared with Scott Silver.

Joker won the Golden Lion at the 76th Venice International Film Festival in 2019, making Phillips one of a small number of American directors of mainstream studio films to receive the prize. The film also received the Academy Awards for Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix) and Best Original Score (Hildur Guðnadóttir).

Earlier in his career, The Hangover (2009) won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the 67th Golden Globe Awards. The film also received the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Comedy from the Broadcast Film Critics Association. Frat House (1998), Phillips's second documentary feature, won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, although the film was ultimately not broadcast as originally planned.

Legacy

Phillips occupies an unusual position in contemporary American filmmaking, having moved across multiple genres and registers over the course of three decades. His 2000s comedies — particularly Old School and The Hangover — were influential in shaping the dominant style of American studio comedy during that period, characterized by ensemble male casts, escalating set-pieces, and a willingness to deploy R-rated content within a mainstream commercial framework. The Hangover in particular became a reference point for the studio comedy economy of the late 2000s and early 2010s, and its commercial performance established the financial viability of adult-targeted comedies as event-scale releases.

Phillips's pivot to dramatic material with War Dogs and, more dramatically, Joker has been treated by industry observers as one of the more pronounced genre transitions undertaken by a major commercial director in recent decades. The success of Joker — both commercially, as the first R-rated film to gross more than one billion dollars, and critically, as a Golden Lion winner and multiple Academy Award nominee — opened space within the contemporary comic-book film industry for stand-alone, character-driven properties produced outside of interconnected cinematic universes. The mixed reception of Joker: Folie à Deux has subsequently been treated as a complication to that legacy, prompting renewed discussion of the boundaries between auteur-driven filmmaking and franchise expectations at major studios.

His career trajectory — beginning with a documentary about a fringe punk performer, moving to broad commercial comedies, and culminating in a Venice-prize-winning psychological thriller — is frequently cited as an example of the porousness of categories within American studio filmmaking in the twenty-first century.