Rust director Joel Souza broke his silence to Vanity Fair regarding the tragic 2021 shooting that wounded him and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins .
Souza was wounded in October 2021 when a prop gun held by actor Alec Baldwin on the set of the low-budget western misfired. Hutchins was struck in the chest, the bullet passing through her body and hitting Souza’s shoulder. The director said the shell “missed my lung by this much. It stopped about that far away from my spine, fortunately. It was bulging out into the skin, so it created a big bump.”
Souza said the impact “felt like a horse kicked me in the shoulder or someone hit me with a bat…The whole right side of my body went numb, completely numb, but it also hurt excruciatingly at the same time, if that makes sense,” he explained. “It’s just like everything went tingly and numb but hurt like hell all at once. And I staggered back and was either on my knees or on my ass—and just…yelling. I don’t even know what the hell I was yelling.”
Contrary to what his friends and family frequently told him following the incident, Souza “wasn’t” feeling lucky to be alive. He admitted that in the hours after Hutchins died, he wished he would “bleed out overnight” because “I didn’t want to be around anymore.”
“It was a very difficult moment,” Souza said. “I remember just thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just sort of bleed to death—that would suit me just fine.’”
Three years later, the director is still having difficulty processing the tragedy. “When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think,” Souza said. “I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins. I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.”
He continued: “It’s not like I was in love with the guy I was before, anyway. You look in the mirror the day after that happens, and now there’s somebody else there. I didn’t know things about the world one day, and now I do. And none of them are good.”
Souza explained that one of the hardest things about the incident for him to wrap his head around was “who was holding the gun.” The director recalled being a young child watching Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October and thinking, ‘Hey, that guy…someday [we’ll work together].’”
Baldwin and Souza reunited earlier this year to finish Rust , though Souza clarified that the two have “no relationship.” However, they both wanted to finish the picture so that they could donate proceeds from its distribution to Hutchins’ family.
“Getting through it was tough,” Souza said of the production’s second half. “We got through it. I got the performance I wanted,” he said of Baldwin before adding, “We’re not friends. We’re not enemies. There’s no relationship.”
Souza and Rust’s producers have yet to shop the film to prospective buyers, but the director hopes that when audiences do see it they will see Hutchins’ immense talent rather than the tawdry saga of her tragic death. Out of respect to the late director of photography, Souza brought in another cinematographer “from Hutchins’ circle” to finish her work. He also cut the sequence they were filming when she was killed and changed some other scenes to reflect its absence.
“As a cinematographer, Halyna should have been out of my reach if this business made any sense, but it doesn’t,” Souza said. “She should have been doing big studio movies. She should have outgrown a movie the size of ours. She should have been doing $100 million movies, not $7.5 million movies. Anybody who worked with her knew what she had and what she was.”
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