It has been more than a year since rust Filming was completed in Montana. Production was moved there after a fatal shooting occurred on set that left cinematographer Halyna Hutchins dead. Production was shut down, criminal investigations and complicated court cases ensued, and the lives of survivors were thrown into disarray.
Now one of them, director and author Joel Souza, has finally spoken out about the incident and its consequences. In a long interview with Vanity Fair The filmmaker, who was shot in the shoulder, described in the four-hour-long film what else was taken from him at that moment.
“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean it in the way that people might think,” he said. “I don’t mean it ruined my career. I mean, inside, the person I was just disappeared. That stopped.”
In October 2021, while the cast and crew were rehearsing a scene in a chapel on the film’s New Mexico set, a revolver pulled by Alec Baldwin went off and fired a live bullet. The bullet pierced Hutchins’ body and struck Souza, who was standing behind her.
When he was shot, “it felt like a horse had kicked me in the shoulder or someone had hit me with a baseball bat,” he recalls, but the worst was yet to come. As people around him panicked, he watched as crew members lowered Hutchins to the ground, blood seeping through her white shirt.
The 42-year-old Ukrainian-born camerawoman was flown by helicopter to an Albuquerque hospital but later died of her injuries. Souza was taken by ambulance to another hospital and released the next day.
“I remember going to sleep that night hoping I wouldn’t wake up the next morning. I hoped I would just bleed to death overnight because I didn’t want to be here anymore. It was a very difficult moment,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just bleed to death – that would be just right for me.'”
The 51-year-old initially did not want to return to the project, which was canceled after Hutchins’ family settled a lawsuit that called for her husband Matthew Hutchins to be brought on board as executive producer. But Souza changed his mind when she realized that rust had to be completed for the family – and for Hutchins himself.
“I knew that Halyna’s family would benefit financially if the film was completed, and that’s very important to me,” he explained. “And I know that this can sound trite to people who aren’t creative, but her final work is important. It’s important that people see her final work. That was the deciding factor for me in my decision.”
A sign points to the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on October 22, 2021.
Anne Lebreton/AFP via Getty Images
“I’m sure she would have wanted her final work to be seen,” he continued. “If I had been killed instead of her – as I should have been – she would have done the same. She would be committed to making sure my final work was seen. That’s important to Matt, too. He knows that it’s cathartic for the people who cared about her and who might have appreciated her work to see that.”
The director has never spoken publicly about it rust He cooperated with detectives and testified in April in the trial of gunsmith Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, which ended with a conviction and an 18-month prison sentence for manslaughter.
As for Baldwin, his manslaughter case was dismissed last month after a judge found the state had withheld evidence that could have explained how the live bullet – and at least five others later discovered by investigators – got onto the set.
Baldwin also returned to rustWhen asked what their relationship was like while filming in Montana, Souza replied, “It was tough to get through it. We got through it. I performed the way I wanted to. We’re not friends. We’re not enemies. There’s no relationship.”
The director also declined to comment on his actor’s complicated legal saga, saying he understood both sides of the argument about Baldwin’s guilt and questioned whether his opinion mattered.
“To be honest, I don’t remember,” Souza said. “The charges were filed. That’s what they decided to do. Was he overcharged? I don’t know.”
But one thing is certain: the chapel scene will not appear in the finished film. Souza said Vanity Fair that the sequence had “completely” disappeared in the final cut.
“We just eliminated it and came up with something completely different,” he said. “I’m not going back to that.”
