‘I had to see it through for her’: Rust director speaks out about life on set after the tragic shooting

Joel Souza says he and Halyna Hutchins weren’t the most obvious collaborators.

Whereas the American filmmaker’s ambitions were shaped early on by his childhood infatuation with Amblin Entertainment’s 1980s hits - think E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies - Hutchins, a Ukrainian cinematographer, spent her formative years watching what Souza describes as smaller “art films.”

And yet the two found a common language when Souza brought Hutchins on board as director of photography on Rust, a $US7.5 million ($A11.7 million) western starring Alec Baldwin as a gruff 19th-century outlaw who must come to the rescue of his fugitive grandson (Patrick Scott McDermott).

Souza was optimistic about the work they would create together.

He couldn’t have known that his sixth feature film, which he started developing a decade after his directorial debut, would be the one to drastically alter both their lives.

For a while, things went smoothly.

Souza and Hutchins shared a love of the enduring American genre and talked at length about movies such as Days of Heaven, Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men.

They spent hours scouting locations in New Mexico, climbing hills and driving toward far-off mountaintops as they worked together to determine how they could best make use of daylight hitting the vast desert landscapes.

“The DP is the person I work with more than anyone,” Souza, 51, says in late April over a Zoom call from his home in Pleasanton, California.

So, how does it feel for Rust to be released without Hutchins celebrating by his side?

The film will be widely available on demand on Friday, more than three years after Hutchins, 42, was fatally shot on set by a prop gun that discharged in Baldwin’s hands. (Rust will also play in select theatres, but not in any in Washington.)

The Oscar-nominated actor was cleared of criminal wrongdoing last year when a judge dismissed his involuntary manslaughter case over mishandled evidence.

Armourer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, tasked with handling weapons on set, was found guilty of the same charge and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Assistant director David Halls was charged under a plea deal with negligent use of a deadly weapon and received six months of unsupervised probation.

After years of unrelenting controversy and tense legal proceedings, “there’s a real sense of crossing a finish line,” Souza says. “That chapter of things closes … Friday. I guess there’s relief in that.”

Souza, who was hit in the shoulder by remnants of the same rogue bullet that travelled through Hutchins’s chest in October 2021, was reluctant to return to Rust when he heard producers were thinking of starting things up again about a year after the incident.

It was only when he confirmed with Hutchins’s husband, Matthew, that he and Hutchins’s Ukrainian family hoped for the public to see her final work that Souza decided to reassume his position as director. Matthew became an executive producer on the film as part of a settlement that also stipulated he and the couple’s young son, Andros, would receive a portion of its profits.

“There were people saying both ‘How can you do this?’ and ‘How can you not do this?’” Souza says.

“I don’t begrudge anybody their opinion. All I can say is … I had to see it through for her.”

Hutchins was killed on Day 12 of what was scheduled to be a 21-day shoot, Souza says.

When Rust resumed production in April 2023, they wound up shooting for 26 or 27 days, allowing for a more “manageable schedule.”

Hutchins was replaced by cinematographer Bianca Cline (“Marcel the Shell With Shoes On”), who worked with Souza to salvage as much of her predecessor’s work and overall vision as she could.

There was a fair amount of crew member turnover when the production moved from New Mexico’s Bonanza Creek Ranch to Montana’s Yellowstone Film Ranch. But many of the actors were able to return - including Baldwin, who had developed the story with Souza and was a producer on the project. Baldwin’s initial charge of involuntary manslaughter was dropped right before shooting resumed in 2023. He was indicted again on the same charge in January 2024 and was once again cleared that July.

“I don’t know that there was ever a more difficult movie made than this,” Souza says, adding of Baldwin: “It was emotionally fraught for everybody. I’m sure it was emotionally fraught for him. It wasn’t easy. I’m sure I wasn’t easy. But at the end of the day, we finished it, so.”

The director, who otherwise speaks freely about his experiences on Rust, responds tersely when asked whether he has remained in touch with Baldwin: “There’s this thing where they always want people who make movies together to be best friends,” he says.

“It’s like, I don’t know, are you best friends with someone you worked with for two months, once? It doesn’t work that way.”

At the very least, actors tend to reunite with their director to promote a film before its release.

But Baldwin hasn’t conducted any high-profile interviews to promote Rust and was not invited to its November premiere at the Energa Camerimage film festival in Poland.

There has been minimal marketing for the western overall - an echo of how Miramax years ago handled The Crow, the 1994 superhero movie on the set of which 28-year-old Brandon Lee, the lead actor, was also killed by a prop gun.

Back then, David Dinerstein, Miramax’s president of marketing, told the Los Angeles Times that “what happened is not something we’re running from. But we have to be very sensitive to Brandon’s memory, his family and the film.”

Marketing materials for The Crow didn’t mention the accident.

Neither does the Rust trailer.

“There are no winners in marketing this movie,” says Monica Koyama, a communications professor at the University of Southern California who worked on Hollywood campaigns for 25 years.

“If you acknowledge the tragedy too much, it takes away from the film and moves the spotlight away from the actual work. At the same time, you have to acknowledge it. Everybody’s talking about it.”

Baldwin and his wife, Hilaria, mentioned the on-set incident about 90 seconds into the February premiere of their critically panned TLC reality series, The Baldwins. Hilaria starts off by saying: “The hardest part about this is that a woman lost her life. A son lost his mom.”

Alec notes that he has “never been through anything like this in my life,” after which the audio cuts to Hilaria asking out loud: “Where do you go from a tragedy?”

Souza doesn’t have the answer. But he made sure he did everything he could to prevent another catastrophe from occurring on the Montana set.

He says the new armourer, Andrew Wert, worked with replica weapons and built custom props that “might as well have been paperweights.”

“Nothing on the second go-around was capable of firing,” Souza says.

“It was all done with CGI.”

Baldwin was rehearsing a scene set in a church when the revolver discharged in 2021. When Souza returned to the project, he cut the scene and rewrote those around it. “There’s no trace of it,” he says.

The filmmaker didn’t want viewers playing detective, trying to figure out which sequence was the one that led to Hutchins’s untimely death.

He hates that people remember her final moments most, and he instead tries to focus on his memories of her radiant spirit and enthusiasm for her craft.

“I think of her skipping from setup to setup - not because we were pressed for time, but because she wouldn’t wait to do the next one,” Souza says.

“No one loved making movies like she did.”

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