Directing duo Joel and Ethan Coen have won the top prize at the 60th annual Directors Guild of America (DGA) Awards Saturday night in Century City for their work on No Country for Old Men. The movie already won three prizes at the 13th annual Critics’ Choice Award held earlier this month at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, for best picture, best director (Joel and Ethan Coen) and best supporting actor (Spanish actor Javier Bardem).

The film is based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, who inspired the name of his book from Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” and follows a series of events at the United States – Mexico border in 1980, where a drug deal gone bad changes the lives of three people, Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, sheriff Ed Tom Bell and Anton Chigurh, a sociopath hired to recover the $2.4 million cash lost during the drug deal.

"It's nice to get the acknowledgment of critics and even audiences, but there is something about being acknowledged by people who do the same thing you do," said Joel Coen at the DGA awards.

The Coen Brothers have been nominated for 8 Academy Awards, each winning one for Fargo. They have become only the second duo to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. The first pair to achieve this is Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story.

They are also two of only five people to have four Academy Award nominations for the same film (No Country for Old Men: Picture, Director, Screenplay, Editing). The others are Orson Welles, Warren Beatty and Alan Menken.

A week ago the Directors Guild of America (DGA) reached a new three-year pay deal with the main producer's organization, the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP), upping pressure on the striking Writers Guild of America (WGA) to end its 12-week strike that has disrupted film and TV production. Under the terms of the deal, directors will be granted rights for residual payments for content that is downloaded or streamed over the internet.