Directors’ cut: A closer look at award season favourites Joe Wright and Martin McDonagh

In one corner there’s Darkest Hour, a tale of plucky British spirit on a grand scale, when national hero Winston Churchill boldly went with his instinct, overriding his political party, to resist the Nazis. In the other, we have Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. It’s about a woman in a small American town who like Churchill is bold and spirited, but is reacting against her lack of power; in the face of her daughter’s rape and murder.

Both won big at Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAGs), and they are tipped to win big at the Oscars next month. Although they are set in strikingly different worlds, behind both of these success stories are London directors. Darkest Hour was made by Joe Wright, who is in the news this month after splitting with his wife of seven years, sitar player and composer Anoushka Shankar, and being seen with Girl on a Train actress Haley Bennett.

Three Billboards is Martin McDonagh’s baby. He celebrated his Golden Globes wins (for best screenplay and best director) with London actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge at his side. She’s recently separated from her husband Conor Woodman, a documentary film- maker.

Whoever The Academy decides to honour next month, both McDonagh, 47, and Wright, 45, are directors at the top of their game, supporting women in film and winning global acclaim. Here’s how they measure up.

The origin stories

Like all great rivalries, this one pits north London against south. Wright grew up in Islington, where his parents are big names — they founded the Little Angel Puppet Theatre. He calls it “an incredibly magical world, where anything was possible”. Wright’s father was 65 when he was born; Wright has said he related more to his more emotionally open mother and sister and many of his films explore repressed male emotion.

Bullied at the local comprehensive and struggling with dyslexia, he bunked off school. Instead of struggling through lessons he spent days watching films and sought escape through drama at the Anna Scher theatre school (where he became friends with Kathy Burke) and performing magic shows in Covent Garden. He started out as an actor, appearing alongside Kenneth Branagh onstage in Another Country aged 10 and leaving school at 16 to pursue stage and screen dreams. He’s a risk taker — above his desk there is a poster with the Samuel Beckett quote “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail better” on it.

McDonagh is a Camberwell boy. His parents are both Irish and the family went back regularly — McDonagh has British and Irish citizenship and went to a Catholic school where he was taught by Irish priests. They moved to London in search of better-paid jobs, his father worked in construction and his mother was a cleaner. Ireland looms large in McDonagh’s work — his early plays were set around County Galway, where he spent his childhood holidays. Connemara stuck in his mind, he says: “Just the lunar quality, the remoteness, the wildness, the loneliness of it.”

His parents moved back to Galway in 1992, leaving McDonagh and his brother John (older by two years and now a successful writer and director, who made Cavalry) living in their house near Camberwell Green. Like Wright, McDonagh left school at 16. He found a job at the civil service, in the Department of Trade and Industry, but it didn’t last long — he was desperate to try writing, inspired by the Clash song Clampdown and Joe Strummer’s “poetic rage”. The tedium of his job was ultimately motivating. “It made me think, I have to do something; I don’t want to be stuck here for the rest of my life,” he said.

He’s close to his brother and wrote his first plays when John went in Los Angeles on a screen writing scholarship leaving his brother at a loose end. McDonagh has said their relationship is competitive, characterised by: “love, love, love, and a tiny spark of hate”.

Like Wright, McDonagh knows about men putting a brave face on things. He has said: “I don’t find it easy for me to talk about me” and admires Nick Cave for telling a journalist, “Google it, fucker” when he didn’t want to answer a question about his personal life.

The awards hype

Gary Oldman (another south Londoner) is the star of Darkest Hour. His portrayal of Winston Churchill won the Outstanding Performance by a Leading Actor award at the SAGs this weekend. He donned heavy prosthetics to play the PM and said: “Churchill reminds us we make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give”. He has already racked up a Golden Globe for the role and is nominated for a Bafta.

In Wright style, Darkest Hour explores confidence and repressed torment, namely the tension between strong public presence and a troubled mind. It follows Churchill through his first month in office, May 1940. His party want to avoid a repeat of the First World War and he’s weighing this up against the need to resist Nazi Germany.

We’re familiar with this period at the moment, from Netflix’s The Crown and Dunkirk, but Wright started writing Darkest Hour in January 2016 and says he “felt like I was being original.”

Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays Churchill’s wife Clementine, says depicting real people is “scary”. “You don’t want to be disrespectful but you don’t want to create this sort of fake goddess.” Wright is supportive of women in his industry: “Unfortunately, too many directors are proportionally male. I think they are afraid of emotion and don’t like actors because they are too emotional, which is ironic because what you’re asking them to do is work with their emotions...I love actors.”

Meanwhile, Three Billboards is pure fiction — it’s even set in a made-up town. It’s about Mildred Hayes, who, plagued with a toxic mix of grief and guilt over her daughter’s unsolved rape and murder, hires three billboards on the way into the town where she lives, saying a young girl has been “raped, while dying”, “and still no arrests?”, “how come, Chief Willoughby?” Willoughby, the police chief, is dying of pancreatic cancer, which Hayes knows, retorting to him: “I know it. They wouldn’t be so effective after you croak, right?”

It’s topical, given the sexual misconduct allegations against the governor of Missouri, but it was written in 2013.

Frances McDormand plays Hayes in a performance that is a career high — it’s already earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress and a SAG for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role (there’s speculation she backed Saoirse Ronan for the Best Actress Oscar in her acceptance speech). The film is part homage to the Coen brothers and it feels apt that she was in Fargo and is Joel Coen’s wife. The whole cast is strong — winning the Best Ensemble Cast award at the SAGs.

McDonagh is loyal to actors and has worked with Sam Rockwell many times before, casting him in his play A Behanding in Spokane. We meet Rockwell as a cocky, power-drunk police officer but it turns out that’s just the start of his journey.

McDonagh’s relationship with film is not straightforward. He said: “[Making] Seven Psychopaths wasn’t so bad but In Bruges was exhausting. I had to become a director to protect the scripts.” The script is strong in Three Billboards and Faber is publishing it. McDonagh is hands on — he joins in with the cast’s circuit training — but unsentimental, saying: “You can’t write thinking of your mum, you can’t think of your girlfriend and you also can’t just think of your own political correctness”.

The love lives

Wright’s professional mantra of “fail again. Fail better” can be applied to his love life too. In 2008 his called off his engagement to girlfriend of four years actress Rosamund Pike, after their save the dates had been sent (with a picture of them on that they designed “to make people laugh”, Pike said).

Now he has two sons, Zubin, aged six, and Mohan, aged two, with Anoushka Shankar (she’s part of a music dynasty as Ravi Shankar’s daughter and Norah Jones’s half-sister). Since their split was announced, Shankar has been moon-bathing and wrote on Instagram: “There’s been a lot of pain, and yet I still have the greatest gifts I could have asked