On March 13, filmmaker Alex Smith will visit TU to screen and answer questions about his feature film, Walking Out: an outdoor adventure story starring Golden Globe winner Matt Bomer, Josh Wiggins, and Bill Pullman. The event will be held in the Gussman Concert Hall, Lorton Performance Center at 7:00 p.m., and it’s free and open to the public.
Smith and his twin brother Andrew work together in film and television, and Walking Out is their most recent film, which is an adaptation of David Quammen’s landmark short story. The movie, which is the third feature film the brothers have written and directed, premiered in the Dramatic Competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
The story follows urban teenager Cal as he journeys to Montana to hunt big game with his estranged father. Father and son struggle to connect until a brutal encounter in the heart of the wilderness changes everything.
The Smiths also recently wrote, directed, and produced the feature film, Winter in the Blood, which is based on the classic James Welch novel. Winter in the Blood stars Chaske Spencer, Julia Jones (both of the Twilight Saga), and won numerous festival awards. Previously, they wrote and directed the award-winning feature film, The Slaughter Rule, starring Ryan Gosling, Amy Adams, Clea DuVall, and David Morse, which premiered in competition at Sundance.
The brothers are currently writing two pilots: an adaptation of Kevin Brockmeier’s best-selling novel, The Brief History of the Dead for Amazon and The Darklings, a supernatural adolescent drama set in post-WWII Europe for Red Arrow International.
Alex is a Sundance Fellow, a Michener Center for Writers Fellow and a Rauschenberg Residency Fellow. He lives at the Byrdcliffe Artists’ Colony in Woodstock, New York. He works as a script consultant and an educator, having taught at The University of Texas for a decade, where he was the creative director of The University of Texas Film Institute.