The director of “Rust” has spoken out for the first time in depth about the on-set shooting that almost killed a man and took the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Joel Souza and Hutchins were both shot when prop Alec Baldwin’s gun went off during a rehearsal on the set of the Western movie in October 2021. In a new interview, the director, 51, said that after the shooting, he wanted to. he will “bleed out” because he “doesn’t want to be there anymore.”
To this day, the tragedy leaves him feeling “broken”.
“When I tell people who hurt me, I don’t mean that people can think. I don’t mean to hurt my career,” Souza told Vanity Fair. “I mean, inside, the person I just left. That stopped.”
“The doctor kept telling me in Santa Fe, ‘You know how lucky you are?'” the director recalled after the accident.
“And I was like, ‘I don’t feel so f–king lucky.’ It missed my lungs. It stopped about short of the spine, luckily.
When asked if he was thankful to be alive while recovering in the hospital, Souza said, “No, I’m not. I remember specifically going to bed at night and hoping not to wake up in the morning.”
“I hope it just bleeds out overnight because I don’t want to be there anymore,” she added.
“It was a very difficult moment. I remember just thinking, ‘Maybe I’m going to bleed to death—that suits me.'”
After weeks and months passed, Souza continued to struggle.
“I’m not a nightmare person, and then I had nightmares every night, for over a year,” he said.
“They’re just nightmares. Sometimes they’re very shapeless and formless, and sometimes they’re very specific.
She continued, “I went to a lot of therapy. It never worked for me. I believed it could help other people, and I envied the comfort it gave me.
“I wish I had something like that. I just never. So I will go through six therapies. Something wandered in the forest that was left behind after that.”
Now, the feeling of “not wanting to be there anymore” seems to have subsided, to say the least.
“You have responsibilities in life, and the people you love love you, and you want to be there,” he said. “There have been many very difficult times in the past years, and there are very difficult times now.”
Baldwin, who is also a producer on “Rust,” has maintained that he never pulled the trigger of a prop gun. According to investigators, the weapon was loaded with live ammunition when it should have been “empty”.
The film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Baldwin was also charged with involuntary manslaughter, but his trial was thrown out in July after the judge in the case ruled that evidence had been tampered with by local law enforcement.
Although initially reluctant to complete the film, Souza changed his mind because he felt “convinced” that Hutchins “wanted his final work to be seen.”
However, the scenes in the film that are being rehearsed during filming will not be in the final cut. “It’s all gone,” he said.
