The only times collaborating directors have been nominated for ‘Best Director’
Making it to the top of the film business requires a certain single-mindedness, which might be why so few directorial pairings have ever found themselves nominated for ‘Best Director’ at the Academy Awards. The Oscars like idols and sharing the spoils just doesn’t really fit into that.
Two filmmakers sharing a career behind the camera is hardly unheard of, but very rarely does it yield the sort of quality that gets recognised by the most illustrious ceremony on the annual awards season calendar. It has happened, though, but it’s hardly reflective of how many notable movies have been helmed by a duo.
Lana and Lilly Wachowski changed the face of cinema forever with The Matrix, Josh and Benny Safdie became two of independent cinema’s leading lights, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck steered Captain Marvel to over a billion dollars at the box office, Anthony and Joe Russo are among the highest-grossing filmmakers in history, while Greg and Colin Strause completely shit the bed with Alien vs. Predator: Requiem.
Partnering up doesn’t guarantee quality, then, with every Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger having their Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer to balance the scales. Of course, Joel and Ethan Coen are among the rare lot to have shared a ‘Best Director’ nod at the Oscars, but it’s only happened twice.
As surprising as that may be appear at first glance, it’s only because Joel has shouldered the burden of carrying the majority of their directing credits. When they split their nomination the first time around, they ended up winning when No Country for Old Men took the prize. They weren’t quite as fortunate second time around, but True Grit nonetheless made them the only directorial duo to be shortlisted twice over.
They weren’t the first ever, with Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins making history with their 1961 version of West Side Story, and they’d remain the only dual-wielding auteurs to gain Oscars recognition for almost three decades until Warren Beatty and Buck Henry shared the spoils for Heaven Can Wait. The latter didn’t emerge victorious, and it would be more 30 years until the Coens became the third.
As a result, there wasn’t a single non-Coen two-headed directing beast to make the ‘Best Director’ race between 1978 and 2022, until the mavericks responsible for the mind and reality-bending multiversal masterpiece Everything Everywhere All at Once spearheaded an almost complete clean sweep of the major categories.
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – or ‘Daniels’ for the sake of brevity – became the fourth pair to be nominated as a collective and the third to win, leaving Beatty and Henry out in the cold as the only directing duo to be in the running for a ‘Best Director’ Oscar who didn’t end up having their names read out aloud onstage.
