It’s been more than a year since Rust wrapped filming out in Montana, where production was shifted after the deadly on-set shooting that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, shutting down production, sparking criminal investigations and tangled legal proceedings, and derailing the survivors’ lives.
Now, one of them, director and writer Joel Souza, is finally speaking out about the incident and its aftermath. In a lengthy interview with Vanity Fair that stretched over more than four hours, the filmmaker, who was shot in the shoulder, described what else was taken away from him in that instant.
“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think,” he said. “I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins. I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.”
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While the cast and crew were rehearsing a scene in a chapel on the film’s New Mexico set in October 2021, a prop revolver being drawn by Alec Baldwin went off, firing a live round. The bullet passed through Hutchins’ body and hit Souza, who was standing behind her.
Being shot “felt like a horse kicked me in the shoulder or someone hit me with a bat,” he recalled, but the worst was yet to come. As people panicked around him, he saw crew members lowering Hutchins to the ground, blood seeping through her white shirt.
The 42-year-old Ukrainian-born cinematographer was airlifted to a hospital in Albuquerque, but later died of her injuries. Souza was taken by ambulance to another hospital and discharged the next day.
“I remember specifically going to sleep that night and hoping I didn’t wake up the next morning. I hoped I would just bleed out overnight because I didn’t want to be around anymore. It was a very difficult moment,” he said. “I remember just thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just sort of bleed to death—that would suit me just fine.’”
The 51-year-old didn’t initially want to return to the project, which was finished after Hutchins’ family settled a lawsuit that stipulated her husband, Matthew Hutchins, be brought on board as an executive producer. But Souza changed his mind, realizing that Rust needed to be completed for the family—and for Hutchins herself.
“I knew that the movie being finished would financially benefit Halyna’s family, which is very important to me,” he explained. “And I know this can sound trite for people who aren’t creative, but her last work matters. People seeing her last work matters. That was the tipping point for me in the 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 do feel confident in saying that she would have wanted her last work to have been seen,” he continued. “If it was me that had gotten killed instead of her—as it should have been—she would do the same thing. She would push for my final work to be seen. It’s also important to Matt. He knows it’s cathartic for people who cared about her and people who might have appreciated her work to see that.”
The director has never spoken publicly about Rust before. He cooperated with criminal investigators and testified at the April trial of armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, which ended in a conviction and 18-month sentence for involuntary manslaughter.
As for Baldwin, his involuntary manslaughter case was dismissed last month after a judge found that the state had withheld evidence that might have explained how the live bullet—plus at least five more later discovered by investigators—could have ended up on the set.
Baldwin also returned to Rust. Asked what their relationship was like on the Montana shoot, Souza replied, “Getting through it was tough. We got through it. I got the performance I wanted. We’re not friends. We’re not enemies. There’s no relationship.”
The director also declined to weigh in on his actor’s messy legal saga, saying he understood both sides of the argument of Baldwin’s culpability and questioning whether his opinion mattered.
“I don’t know anymore, to be honest with you,” Souza said. “The charges got filed. That’s what they decided to do. Was he overcharged? I don’t know.”
But one thing is for sure: The chapel scene won’t be in the finished film. Souza told Vanity Fair that the sequence had vanished “in its entirety” from the final cut.
“We just sort of eliminated it and came up with something entirely different,” he said. “I’m not going back to that.”
