Captain Phillips is a knockout.
Sam Phillips always encouraged me to do it my way, to use whatever other influences I wanted, but never to copy. . . if there hadn't been a Sam Phillips, I might still be working in a cotton field.
The line was originally, ‘Captain Phillips, get a load of me: fancy-free on the seven seas,’ but I ad-libbed.
They [Mike Tyson and Todd Phillips] actually struck up a really pretty incredible chemistry, those two, and I think they really trusted each other.
I had brought up from Chile a contract agent whose cover was that of a newspaper publisher in Santiago, a young, very talented man, named Dave Phillips, who later on carved quite a career for himself in the agency.
Jayne Anne Phillips. . . is at the height of her powers in Lark and Termite. . . . This is a major novel from one of America's finest writers.
God bless him, I mean a lot of times you get non-actors on a set and they get really self-conscious, especially when doing something crazy like singing along with Phil Collins. They get sort of reserved and self-conscious. Mike [Tyson] completely trusted Todd [Phillips] and totally put everything into it.
I wrote another wrestling film script. And we finished the shooting [with Lloyd Phillips]. But Henry Winkler came out with his own wrestling film, which did poorly. So the studios passed on ours, and it never got released.
By and large, the making of motion pictures is all about, 'Let's ratchet it up. ' And I always think, 'We don't need to ratchet this up. ' If you do, don't call it 'Captain Phillips' or 'The Maersk Alabama. ' Call it something else, and then you have carte blanche to do anything, down to sea serpents and aliens.
Todd [Phillips] doesn't care. That's part of his genius as a director, he will say anything to anybody.
