From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. What do you do if you're a director who loves the

idea of subverting expectations

you made a movie that people are wildly hunger for?

It's the question I have for my guest, Todd Phillips, who's the writer-director of Hangover

Three, which follows Hangover Part 2 and The Hangover.

Todd, first of all, thanks for coming back.

Good to see you again.

Good to see you.

But what is that like?

I mean, we've talked about that the last couple of times you've been here, that you so love the

idea of sort of thwarting expectations and now you've got a movie that's the third in the series

of movies, especially that they have so much audience affection. What do you do to sort of shake people out of their ideas for this?

Well, first and foremost, you make a comedy that isn't funny.

That's the...

And suddenly they're going, wait a minute.

What is this?

This is sort of a horror movie.

This is sort of a chase movie.

A heist movie. No, I'm kidding. I mean, it's definitely a comedy first and foremost. But tonally, I've just always had fun with these movies and even other comedies that I've done in just playing with the tone of these films a little bit more than you would say, a straight, broad comedy. And we do that in a lot of ways.

We do that through things as sort of obvious as the cinematography,

and we do it in much more subtle ways of character shifts

...