SAN DIEGO (AP) - Filmmakers Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn are doing double-duty promoting each other’s latest movies.
The two joined cast members Guy Pearce, Carey Mulligan and Ron Perlman at the Comic-Con fan convention Thursday for a joint panel to preview footage of producer del Toro’s horror remake “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” and director Winding Refn’s action thriller “Drive.”
Comic-Con presentations usually focus on one film at a time. But del Toro and Refn said they are such mutual admirers of each other’s works that they wanted to do a “mash-up” to discuss the two movies, which both are being released by FilmDistrict.
Pearce stars with Katie Holmes in “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” playing a father whose young daughter is terrorized by tiny but savage creatures that emerge from the bowels of the mansion he’s restoring. A remake of a 1970s TV movie, the film opens in U.S. cinemas in August.
Mulligan and Perlman co-star in “Drive,” whose cast is led by Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a wheel-man for crooks. The film hits U.S. theaters in September.
The mash-up came about because del Toro had seen such Refn films as “Bronson” and “Valhalla Rising” and that he “wanted to me this insane (expletive)” who had made them. Refn said that del Toro’s films, which include “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the “Hellboy” movies that star Perlman, made him feel “like I’m looking into his brain.”
The two filmmakers and their casts, along with “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark” director Troy Nixey, traded praise and critiques of the two films. But comparing the two, Pearce had a ready quip.
“Ours is better,” he joked. “Ours is much better.”
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