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. 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. He was concentrating on dramatic roles, he didn’t wanna just be a comedy guy.” But Jonah didn’t want to do it, which I respect and still harbour resentment towards.” He laughs. I’d tried to get Jonah to be in The Hangover.” In the Zack Galifianakis part? “Yeah. 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 had read that script out of curiosity before they made the movie, and it wasn’t what the movie was. “Look at every Martin Scorsese movie, then look at Wolf Of Wall Street – it stands out so differently. “He can singlehandedly change the tone of a film with his energy and his exuberance,” he says. He enthuses about Miles Teller’s everyman performance, but gushes about Hill’s arrogant, giggling swagger. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros For me the film is an indictment on the US government and their process of procurement, and the guys are kind of awesome.”įocus on. 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. “The government knew that they couldn’t source 100m rounds of AK ammo in the middle of a drought after two Iraq wars. “To me the guys are heroes,” says Phillips. Despite their unscrupulous exploits, these two underdogs took on the government and, until they started cutting corners, won big-time. He admires how ballsy the War Dogs leads were in real life. 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?’” 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 such bullshit they sell people, that war is about protecting your freedom, but meanwhile people are making billions and billions of dollars. For Phillips, who had read about the story in a 2011 Rolling Stone article, the subject matter resonated. 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. 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. His latest, though, tackles meatier material. Thanks to that stag-do trilogy, Phillips became one of Hollywood’s most successful comedy directors – together the films earned £1.4bn. 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. 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.
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