Injured ‘Rust’ director speaks out about fatal shooting and decides to finish film

‘Rust’ director Joel Souza, in his first interview since the film’s fatal 2021 shooting, recalls the moment Alec Baldwin shot him and cinematographer Halyna Hutchins with a prop gun, and how he later came to the decision to finish the film to make. .

In a Vanity Fair article Posted online Thursday, Souza described the entire incident as “bizarre” and said he remembered watching Baldwin’s 1990 spy thriller “The Hunt for Red October” as a child and imagined himself now saying, “Hey, that guy… once…’

“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people generally think,” he said of the shooting, which left Hutchins dead. ‘I don’t mean it ruined my career. I mean, internally, the person I was just left.

Souza said he was standing behind Hutchins on the film’s set in New Mexico when there was a huge bang — and not the “poof and a pop” associated with the blanks often used in movies.

A prop gun given to Baldwin was loaded with live ammunition. A bullet passed through Hutchins’ chest and into Souza’s shoulder, where it became lodged – with the director saying it narrowly missed his spine and lung.

Souza staggered back, he said, and amid his disorientation and the panic around him, he saw Hutchins being lowered to a seat, blood seeping through her white shirt. They were both rushed to hospitals, while he was in an ambulance and she in a helicopter.

“At the hospital the doctor said, ‘You have a bullet in you.’ And I was just like, ‘What the hell are you talking about? You are wrong,” he said. “I kept explaining that I came from a movie set and that there can’t be a real bullet on a movie set. It’s not allowed. You can’t have it. This is the biggest sin you can ever commit on a movie set.”

Souza said he had not spoken out publicly about what happened earlier because of his grief. Hutchins was not only a colleague but also a friend, he explained. He also did not want to have any influence on the criminal cases that followed.

The film’s gunsmith who loaded the live ammunition, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was sentenced in April to 18 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter. Assistant director David Halls accepted a plea deal and was convicted of negligent use of a deadly weapon for failing to check the prop and declare it safe before handing it to Baldwin, who dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge against him last month. Souza said he has no personal opinion on whether the firing was right or wrong, and said he has “no relationship” with Baldwin.

After initial hesitation, production on the film resumed a year and a half after shooting and was completed last March, Souza said.

He said he returned as director in part to help Hutchins’ family members; they reached a settlement with producers that allowed them to collect a percentage of the film’s revenue. He also wanted to preserve Hutchins’ cinematography.

“If it had been me who had been killed instead of her – as it should have been – she would have done the same. She would insist that my latest work be seen,” he said.

Much of the film was reshot – some of the younger actors had to be replaced due to the amount of time that had passed, all the gunfire was edited digitally, and a scene in a church where the shooting took place was cut from the film entirely deleted. But Souza said he did his best to preserve Hutchins’ work.

When asked about the criticism and rumors that circulated immediately after the shooting surrounding the production’s low budget and safety standards, Souza dismissed many of these criticisms as misleading. Based on reports that the gunmaker would receive $7,900 for four weeks of work, Souza said he had to “extrapolate that – that’s over $100,000 a year.” And a crew strike on the day of the shooting only gave more time to prepare, he said.

“In that downtime, there was plenty of time for people to do the things they needed to do,” he said. ‘There was sufficient time for the gunsmith to check the ammunition and load the weapons. There was no rush that morning.”

He also said there was no evidence to support the rumor that crew members had put real ammunition in the propeller guns to shoot bottles and cans for fun.

As for when “Rust” could be released, Souza said there is no date yet because it “hasn’t been sold” to distributors.

Read more at Vanity fair.