No Country For Old Men wins Directors' Guild award
Story by Jack Foley
JOEL and Ethan Coen have won the top prize at the Directors’ Guild of America (DGA) Awards for their film, No Country For Old Men.
The crime drama is a leading contender for Oscar glory, with eight nominations, and stars Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem.
Adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy, the film follows hunter Llewellyn Moss (Brolin) as he happens across a suitcase full of cash and takes it without realising that it puts him in the path of an unstoppable hitman (Bardem), who will stop at nothing to recover it.
Veteran sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Jones), meanwhile, attempts to make sense of the carnage as he comes to grips with the realisation that he is getting too old to tackle this new kind of lawlessness.
Upon receiving the accolades, a surprised Ethan joked: “Oh, we get two of them.”
The DGA awards have often proved to be an accurate indication of who will win the Best Director Academy Award.
No Country For Old Men beat off competition from fellow directors Sean Penn (Into The Wild), Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) and Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell & The Butterfly).
Other awards presented by the DGA included Yves Simoneau, who won the best director for a TV film for Bury My Heart on Wounded Knee.
Owing to the fact that the DGA honours are untelevised the awards presentation was unaffected by the ongoing writers’ strike, which forced the Golden Globes ceremony to be scrapped in favour of a low-key press conference earlier this month.
Read our review of No Country For Old Men