They’re still in the game

It wasn’t the way their Sundance Cinderella story was supposed to go. Last January, writer-directors and twin brothers Alex and Andrew Smith arrived at the Sundance Film Festival -- where over the years they had soaked up the scene as enthusiastic volunteers and attendees -- with their feature directorial debut, “The Slaughter Rule,” in competition. The poignant drama -- about the relationship between an outsider teenager whose father has just died and the shifty coach who recruits him to play rugged six-man football in rural Montana -- had a healthy advance buzz, a rising star in Ryan Gosling (“The Believer”), a career-high performance from character actor David Morse (“Proof of Life”) and, upon its Park City premiere, a warm critical reception.

But the thematically ambitious, layered film -- at times as bleak and unyielding as the Montana winter frost it captures in wide screen -- departed the festival with no awards or distribution deal. “It was disappointing,” Alex says. The movie “was about a guy who gets cut” from his high school football team, “not a winner, and we kind of went through that with the film after the festival.”

Panicked, Andrew and Alex even considered making cuts until other festivals came calling, including the AFI Festival in Los Angeles and MOMA’s “New Directors/New Films” series in New York, where “The Slaughter Rule” was one of only three American dramas to screen last year. But again they were disheartened, at least initially, to learn the producers had sold the film to the Sundance Channel, where it aired last month. A theatrical release was important to the Smith brothers, who had made a number of sacrifices to shoot on film. Fortunately, independent distributor Cowboy Pictures was still interested, and audiences in major cities can see “The Slaughter Rule” as Alex and Andrew intended. It opens Friday in Los Angeles at the ArcLight.

The Smiths, 35 (Alex is 12 minutes older), began writing the script 12 years ago when they discovered that, while at different universities, they each had been writing about a coach from their childhood who continued to haunt them.

Like Roy, the teen in the film, Andrew and Alex grew up in a small Montana town outside Missoula and were cut from their high school team, but their sport was basketball. Soon after, they “got a phone call from a guy in town who was rounding up all the players who were cut ... to form his own men’s league team of the also-rans,” Andrew says. “The best of the worst,” Alex adds.

The coach was an odd figure, a loner who had a passion for sports, but could also be unpleasant to be around. “We heard rumors from our friends ... that he had a thing for boys,” Andrew says, although there was never any evidence. Basing Morse’s character, Gideon, on the coach, they began working on an early draft of “The Slaughter Rule” centering on basketball, but a screenwriter friend in Texas suggested setting the story in the intense world of six-man football. Ironically, “there was six-man football in Montana, but not where we grew up, so we didn’t know that much about it,” Alex says.

In researching the game, they came across the titular rule, also known as the mercy rule, that if one team is ahead by 45 points, the game is called. Whether Gideon is gay was a divisive issue with the producers, advisors at the Sundance writing and directing labs where the Smith brothers developed the film, and subsequently with audiences in post-screening discussions. “Some people liked the ambiguity of it and other people were adamant that we had to come down on one side or the other,” Andrew says.

That ambiguity, the Smith brothers say, scared off investors, who wanted a clearer or more upbeat ending.

Andrew and Alex were keen on Morse to play Gideon after seeing his performances in “The Crossing Guard” and the play “How I Learned to Drive.” “He pulls off a combination of somebody you’re sympathetic toward and weary of that we needed,” Alex says. At Sundance several years ago, Alex approached the actor with the script and Morse quickly committed.

“I stuck with it,” says Morse, who currently stars in the CBS series “Hack.” “And they stuck with me, [although] there were times when it probably would have been easier for them if they got a bigger name.”

The $500,000 film was shot over 24 days in November and December of 2000 in Montana during an unexpectedly harsh winter. Morse, who has twin sons, noted the Smiths’ different personalities in the way they approached him on set. “Alex is the guy who just comes straight up to you,” he says, while “you hear somebody whispering in your ear behind you and it’s Andrew.”

There are other differences. Andrew lives in New York, Alex in Los Angeles. Alex likes to write short stories, while Andrew writes poetry. As with many brothers, “there is a lot of friction and tension but actually we bonded better directing than we do writing,” Alex says. Film “is such a collaborative medium and it’s good to have somebody you trust there with you the whole time.” Andrew says, “We have very, very good shorthand with each other.”

Looking to their next projects, the Smiths just turned in to Touchstone Pictures the latest draft of “The Faithful,” a Civil War ghost story they hope to direct.

“As this year’s played out,” Alex says, “it’s actually turned out, I think, to be in a weird kind of way a blessing, because we’ve been able to really travel with the film to a lot of film festivals and