‘It ruined me’: Rust director speaks for first time about fatal on-set shooting

Joel Souza, the director of the movie Rust, has said that although he survived being shot in the shoulder in the same on-set incident involving Alec Baldwin that killed the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and shocked the industry, a part of him feels like it did not.

“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think,” he told Vanity Fair in a lengthy interview, speaking publicly for the first time since the tragedy.

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“I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins. I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.”

The incident occurred during filming in New Mexico on 21 October 2021 when a prop gun held by Baldwin went off during rehearsal, firing a live round of ammunition toward the crew behind the camera. Hutchins was shot in the chest, and remnants from the ammunition lodged in Souza’s shoulder, fracturing his scapula and settling near his spine.

A three-year web of investigations and legal proceedings followed, on which Souza has stayed publicly quiet. The prop armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison for loading a live round into Baldwin’s prop gun. An assistant director, Dave Halls , accepted a plea bargain and was convicted of negligent use of a firearm for failing to check what should have been dummy rounds in Baldwin’s gun before filming.

Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter in a highly publicized trial, though the case was dismissed in July for the prosecution’s mishandling of evidence . Following the dismissal of Baldwin’s case, Gutierrez-Reed is now seeking to have her conviction overturned .

In his first comments on the legal proceedings, Souza said the verdicts made him feel “just awful in general. Everything that bubbles up from this movie is just devastating.

“I have tried to remove myself from result thinking,” he added. “From should, from deserve, from fair. Nothing that happened in any of this was fair. No one deserved this, any of it, but it happened.”

Souza described Hutchins, a friend and a collaborator, as a positive, supportive voice on set. “As a cinematographer, Halyna should have been out of my reach if this business made any sense, but it doesn’t,” he said.

“She should have been doing big studio movies. She should have outgrown a movie the size of ours. She should have been doing $100m movies, not $7.5m movies. Anybody who worked with her knew what she had and what she was.”

Souza discussed the irony that Rust was about a boy who accidentally shoots someone. Baldwin plays the child’s grandfather, a former outlaw, who comes to his rescue.

The director told Vanity Fair about creative disputes over the character with Baldwin, who also served as a producer on the film and helped secure its funding. Both men returned a year and a half after the accident to finish the movie, a decision Souza attributes to the desire to preserve and showcase Hutchins’s final work.

“Getting through it was tough,” Souza said of working with Baldwin to complete the film. “We got through it. I got the performance I wanted. We’re not friends. We’re not enemies. There’s no relationship.”

He also disputed claims that the film’s small budget or busy schedule directly contributed to the accident.

“I think it would be disingenuous and lunacy to say that people didn’t screw up things. I don’t think anyone would ever allege that anything was intentional,” he said. “But when there are matters of things like ammunition and guns and safety, you don’t fuck around there. You just don’t. And so the armorer had to answer for her role in that. And then Dave [Halls] chose to answer for that.”

Souza appeared to agree with the interviewer, Anthony Breznican, that the cause of the accident was Gutierrez-Reed loading a live round into the prop gun. “The live bullet got put in the gun,” he said. “It was a horrible mistake to make, and she’s now living with the consequences of that mistake … Everything that happened was born out of that sin, out of that moment. That single act is what put the rest of this into motion.”

The film was completed in March, with the help of the cinematographer Bianca Cline. Souza said he worked to include as much of Hutchins’s work as possible in the final movie, excluding the scene they were filming during the accident, which has been cut.

“Her last work matters,” he said. “People seeing her last work matters.”