Doctors kept telling Joel Souza how lucky he was to be alive, but he didn’t see it that way. The writer-director of the Western drama Rust had been gravely wounded in the accidental on-set shooting that claimed the life of his friend and collaborator, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Even though Souza survived, a part of him felt like he actually didn’t.

“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think,” Souza tells Vanity Fair in his first-ever interview about the incident. “I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins. I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.”

The 51-year-old adds, “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.”

The unthinkable happened on the New Mexico set of Rust in October 2021, when a prop gun held by actor Alec Baldwin went off during a rehearsal, firing a live round toward the crew behind the camera. Hutchins was fatally struck in the chest, and the remnants of the slug lodged in Souza’s shoulder, penetrating so deep that it nearly hit his spine. As he lay bleeding on the floor of the chapel set, he tried to grasp what had just happened. Even after multiagency law enforcement investigations, a series of lawsuits, the resolution of multiple criminal cases, and endless media attention, as well as his own near-constant rumination, it still seems unreal to him three years later.

“It’s bizarre to have been shot,” Souza says. “And then, who was holding the gun? That’s bizarre. I had this weird thought, like, God, I remember watching The Hunt for Red October in the movie theater when I was a kid. It’s like your older self whispers to your younger self, ‘Hey, that guy…someday…’”

“Life can take you down some very bizarre roads,” Souza concludes.

The filmmaker has stayed silent publicly ever since. Part of what kept him quiet was abject grief. Hutchins was his coworker, but also his friend. She was a wife and mother of a young son; he is a husband, with two young boys of his own. They bonded over that, as well as their shared love of movies—she was steeped in classics and foreign cinema, while he’s an encyclopedia of Hollywood blockbusters and cult favorites.They’d been working tirelessly on Rust but were also having fun shooting the movie together. He had hoped to team with her for years to come. “Oh my God, she was too cool for me to know,” Souza says. “I felt like, Wow, this is somebody that I feel a really instant bond with.”

He also refused to speak publicly about the shooting out of deference to the criminal cases that resulted. When Souza did talk, it was only to investigators. Prop armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison for loading the live round into Baldwin’s prop gun. Assistant director Dave Halls accepted a plea bargain and was convicted of negligent use of a firearm for failing to check the prop and declaring it was a cold gun before handing it to the actor. An involuntary manslaughter case against Baldwin was dismissed over the prosecution’s mishandling of evidence. Souza was slated to testify in the trial before it ended abruptly on July 12. “There’s a lot of people who know a lot of very specific things about all of it, but in a weird way, I feel like I’m the person who knows the most about all of it,” Souza says.

The criminal cases are finally over, and the movie itself is also finished, although it has not yet been offered up for sale to US distributors, so its release is uncertain. Souza reluctantly returned to complete his job as director a year and a half after the shooting. Even he questions that decision. He says he did that in part to preserve Hutchins’s cinematography, but also to benefit her family, who reached a settlement with producers to collect a percentage of Rust’s earnings.

The day after the Baldwin trial ended, he connects via Zoom from his home in Northern California. The conversation lasts close to four hours.

Before Times

Vanity Fair: You mentioned you were a different person before this incident. Who was that guy?

Joel Souza: I was born in Fremont, California. It’s a quiet suburb in the Bay Area. I grew up very much in the Amblin/Spielberg-esque late ’70s and early ’80s. There might’ve been 30 kids on my block. You’d go home at the end of school, throw your backpack down, go outside, and come back in when your dad whistles you for dinner.

Were movies a big part of your childhood?

I don’t think we really understood anything about movies—I didn’t, anyway—until I was eight years old and my parents took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. I walked out of that movie theater going, Whatever that is, I’m doing that with the rest of my life. Me and my friends would put on stunt shows for the neighborhood kids, and we would take high falls off of people’s roofs through breakaway tables and do these fist fights.

Someone’s dad had one of those old VCRs you’d wear on a shoulder strap. We spent our childhoods making movies. My mom got me a Super 8 camera when I was 11. She was always very, very supportive of me. My old man, not so much. My dad had been in Vietnam, and worked in construction. It was a very stable, normal, regular household. A boring suburban household.

When did filmmaking become a professional pursuit?

After high school ended, me and a friend took film classes. Then I went down to LA to work on a movie called Stargate, to work in its prop department, where we were making vacuform hieroglyphics. Then I came back up to the Bay Area to work on Beverly Hills Cop 3 at the Great America park.

Anyway, that stopped. My old man split in a really bad way when I was 19 or 20. It got really difficult. I never stopped writing, but I didn’t work on movies anymore. I took a job sitting at a desk just to try to keep the family I had left in our house. I worked for a security company. I got very waylaid. I lost a decade of my life to it.

You kept writing screenplays, though?

I was still writing. I had some peripheral crap agent and nothing was happening. I saved enough money to take a shot on myself and quit. I wrote a script that got me a little notice, and that’s around the time I met my wife in Palo Alto. We just had our 20-year meet-iversary.

How did the opportunity to direct come about?

Somebody wanted to hire me to write a kids treasure hunt movie. I said, “I’ll do it, but you’ve got to hire me to direct it.” There was probably a little consternation over that, but they took a shot on me. It was like a little $900,000 movie called Hanna’s Gold.

I was still scraping and pushing and trying to get things going. I made a couple of other similarly sized kids movies. One was a Christmas movie, one was a Halloween movie. I had babies at that point. Anna and I got married in 2007. I look back fondly, but they were nothing like what I wanted to be doing. You just take whatever’s in front of you.

Crown Vic was a level-up for you in 2019.

I wrote the script in 10 days. I’ve never written a script that fast before or since. It was about two police officers getting to know each other over the course of one night. That script started to get me noticed and made the rounds. And then I was able to get that movie made. It got in at Tribeca, and I started feeling like things are building here. Things are going my way at this point.

Meeting Alec Baldwin

Long before Rust, Baldwin was one of the producers of Crown Vic. How did you first connect with him?

The script had gone to a guy in New York who was friends with Alec, and he showed it to him. Alec liked it, and pretty quickly I flew out to New York to meet him. He was going to play this grizzled veteran cop who’d seen it all and is working with a younger cop. The idea was these two cops were like a younger and an older version of the same person, in a sense.

So he was going to play the character Thomas Jane ultimately played?

We had a lot of iterations. This is how indie movies get made. You push that boulder up the hill, you get to the top of the hill, and the boulder rolls over you, flattens you, and goes back down the hill. You pick yourself back up and go. We had a lot of actors attached to playing the younger character opposite Alec. At one point it was Scott Eastwood, then Sebastian Stan. Those were some very painful departures for some very painful reasons.

What did that mean for Baldwin’s involvement?

The investor stayed with us, and we started putting the movie back together, but Alec had an incredibly busy schedule. There was a very clear date beyond which it was not going to work with him. But he was always going to be on as a producer. In the aftermath Alec was incredibly supportive. He went out and pushed it. This was a $3.5 million movie, and yet they were doing stories about us on Access Hollywood because Alec went out and really championed it.

I remember there was a screening of it for him in New York. He was watching the rough cut, and my editor, David Andalman, kept calling me. He goes, “Alec’s yelling and swearing and screaming.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “He fucking loves it. He’s screaming at the screen.”

Is that what led him to sign on to Rust?

I think Alec felt like he missed out. He regretted not having been in it. So he came to me one day, like, “You got anything?” I had two movies that I wanted to write. One was a cop movie that I ended up later writing, called Lowlands, that I'm trying to get made now. The other one was a Western I originally envisioned as a father-son movie, but then with Alec, it became a grandfather-grandson movie. He hired me to write it.

And that’s the beginning of Rust?

It was just that simple. He was like, “I’ve never done a Western. Let’s do the Western.” It was that spur of the moment.

What was the story you presented to him?

I had this idea of a kid who accidentally shot somebody and he was 13. And even at 13, they were still going to sentence this kid to hang. His grandfather, who’s this former outlaw who’s been living in obscurity, comes back and gets this kid out. And my idea originally was, this guy is almost like a Terminator. Anybody gets in his way, he just slaughters them. The guy is just so dark.

To his credit, Alec’s like, “For me, there’s nothing there to play. Try something else.” So instead I made him just a little less that. He wasn’t a single-minded killer. He was a grandfather who had been a very brutal and violent outlaw, but life took him there. We brought that character there in a more organic way.

How many years passed between him saying “let’s do the Western” and actually filming it?

Probably about two and a half. It was a particularly painful two and a half years.

Because it was hard to get funding?

Yeah, we’d come so close so many times and it would just fall apart. What you come across are a lot of people who tell you they can do it. Then they die out on the vine. God, it’s hard to even keep track of how many of those kinds of guys we had to go through.

So you’re really scraping together the budget?

Yeah. Alec had a production shingle called El Dorado Pictures, who hired me to write the thing. But they’re not going to put together a $7–8 million movie. That’s going to be done by somebody else. And so you’re trying to find those people who can get you there.

How was your relationship with Alec throughout all this?

I’ve known him since maybe 2015. You see what you see in the press, you hear stories. We had a very good relationship. When anybody’s famous for a long time—I don’t know that you can ever have an actual, true give-and-take friendship with somebody like that. Not that we should have. We’re very different people in very different parts of life.

He was always very good to me and very deferential to my creative instincts and incredibly supportive, creatively, of me. It’s not like we were braiding each other’s hair after the first five minutes. It took a long time for us to get to know each other. And I don’t think I’m the easiest person in the world to get to know either.

You come to realize relatively quickly that people sort of looked at him like he was a public utility. He’d be walking down the street and people would just give him shit. Or they’d walk up to him and talk to him and they’d expect things out of him. I would see that. I’d have dinner with him at a restaurant and people would just treat him like he’s part of the tour.

Like he owes them?

They act like they know him. It’s like, “Oh, you gotta come talk to my daughter.” And he’s like, “Well, I’m working. I apologize.” But it’s like, “Oh, but you’ve got to come talk to my daughter.” I remember thinking, God, I’m surprised he’s as patient as he is. I’d lose my shit in five minutes on these people.

I remember one time in a hotel in Beverly Hills, we were sitting in the restaurant talking about the script for Rust, and at one point his whole family came down—the nannies and Hilaria. I adjusted my chair in front of some of the kids because people were taking pictures and that bothered me. At a certain point he could tell that I was about to get up and do something about it. He’s like, “No, no, no, please don’t. Please don’t.” He was the one telling me: “Don’t get up and give somebody shit, because that’ll be so bad for me if you do that.”

When you work with him on set, is he somebody who butts heads a lot?

People would call me like, “Oh, you’re going to work with Alec? Well, hold on to your ass. He’s going to be tough.” A camera operator or someone who’s a producer, they’re like, “He’s going to make you miserable.” And I thought…I don’t care. I’ll get the performance. As we got closer and we started filming, it became kind of clear to me we had very different ideas about this character. It kind of fascinated me, because we had talked so much about it. But there were a lot of times where that wasn’t the case. We would get along.

You saw the character as more cold-blooded, and he saw him as more…?

I saw the character as much darker. And I think he wanted…This is a leading-actor thing, I guess. They all want to be the good guy. I wanted the character to be not friendly ever, and very rough with the kid. Alec’s inclination—and I think it probably had to do a lot with his experience with his own kids—was to be friendlier and more fatherly. On the second iteration, I got what I wanted because I made it very clear in the second iteration, it’s my way or the highway.

What do you mean by “second iteration”?

When we went back and finished it in Montana.

So he was more deferential when you returned to finish the movie.

It was a condition for me. I got what I wanted the second time around. But the first time around was more of a struggle. Look, in this business, to pretend that’s unusual would be insane. It’s not unusual.

Meeting Halyna Hutchins

Tell me about Halyna and how you came to hire her for Rust.

Over the years, I would make a list of people whose cinematography I liked. One day I saw a trailer for a movie called Archenemy, a Joe Manganiello movie. I said, “Oh, this looks pretty…I think that’s cool.” So I just wrote her name down. And I remember looking her up and finding her in American Cinematographer magazine, as one of 10 to watch.

What was the process like of bringing her aboard?

I met with some amazing people, one of whom was Bianca Cline, who ended up taking over for Halyna later. I don’t know what it was about Halyna. I don’t know about you, but as an adult, I don’t make friends anymore, really. I don’t know why that is, and I miss having relationships like that. But I felt like, Wow, this is somebody that I feel a really instant bond with. I could be friends with this person.

What was it?

Sensibility, attitude, everything. Halyna was a very positive person, but she was not a Pollyanna about it. She was too cool for me to know her. I mean, she grew up on a [Soviet] naval base [in the Arctic Circle]. She grew up in The Hunt for Red October. Her dad was a sub commander. She had such a style to her. Everything was art for her. I loved the way she talked about her son. I loved the way she talked about her husband. And I thought, Oh, this is cool. I wanted to craft the visuals in complete partnership. And that’s what we started doing.

She seemed really upbeat about Rust in her social media posts.

She was very excited about it. I’ve heard from folks that knew her better than I did that she would talk about her excitement for it. As a cinematographer, Halyna should have been out of my reach if this business made any sense, but it doesn’t. 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.

Did she and Alec bond in this way too?

She and I and Alec had dinner together at Geronimo in Santa Fe. And it was one of those nights that you have when you have dinner with Alec Baldwin…. He’s holding court; he’s doing Al Pacino impressions for you; he’s telling you the most amazing stories about the time he rode an elevator with Burt Lancaster. It’s like, this man escorted Jackie Kennedy on an evening out once. This dinner with just me and him and Halyna was one of those kind of nights.

What did she make of it all?

We had this moment where we just sat in the car for a couple of minutes in silence, and she’s like, “That was kind of amazing.” I think Alec was quite impressed with her as well.

The Fraught Making of Rust

How would you describe your experience on Rust up until the shooting?

The movie was very hard to make. You never have as much time as you want, and you’re always fighting the schedule no matter how big or small you are. In the first iteration of Rust, I was fighting a lot of those battles and feeling like I was at odds with the production office in matters of gear and equipment and days. I wanted Halyna to have what she needed.

That is not a remotely unique situation for indies—and for movies in general. It’s always going to be that sort of push-pull between the creative side of the movie and the production side of the movie.

Some of the enduring questions are: Did Rust skimp on the budget, and was the armorer hired because she was cheap? Was this fatal accident the result of mismanagement? Do you feel that way?

I mean, $7.5 million is a small budget for a movie, but it’s not a small budget for an indie. It’s a normal-sized indie. I remember the production office would tell me about certain hires they would make. At some point they were like, “We’re trying to find armorers and looking in Atlanta. We’re looking here, we’re looking there. We’re not afraid to travel somebody.” They had a hard time finding people because of availability. However, I would also grant that—and I guess you could see this now in hindsight—they probably weren’t going to pay people what they wanted to get paid.

What are your thoughts on that?

I saw some article where they were like, “They were only going to pay her $7,900 for four weeks.” And I’m like, extrapolate that out—that’s over $100,000 a year.

At one point [the production office] told me, “We hired somebody. She just came off a Nicolas Cage Western.” I’m like, “Oh, so Western experience. That’s great, fantastic.”

Had you heard of her father, Thell Reed, who is so legendary as a Western armorer?

I didn’t initially connect the names, but someone said, “Oh, she trained under him.” I’m like, “Oh, wow, that’s cool.” We had a conversation over the phone about a training session. I think that’s probably the longest conversation we had.

Did she seem competent?

I don’t have a lot of experience with armorers. On Crown Vic, the characters are riding around in cars all the time, and so we only had a few days of actual guns in use. That was sort of my first experience with an armorer. I’d see her tell an actor, “No, no, no, please…You point it down. Don’t ever do this.”

So she was aware of the etiquette and the safety measures?

It was all that kind of boilerplate, 101 stuff that you would expect. She’d talk about firing the blanks and what the size of the blanks would be. Quarter load, half load, how to do a little recoil so that it looks realistic. How to draw the gun from the holster, how not to get caught up. What not to do and in what order. Things like that. “Don’t play with it, don’t be an idiot.” That kind of stuff. It just seemed normal to me.

How about your assistant director, Dave Halls? What was your relationship with him?

The production office said, “We have worked with Dave Halls a lot. We like him.” I met him and he was likable and seemed like he knew what he was doing. He was pretty nimble with the schedule initially. He had enthusiasm. He was personable. It’s a tough job. The joke is you don’t ever see a first AD over 50 because they’re dead. And he was much older. It is the hardest job I’ve ever seen on a movie set.

Did he do that well, in your view?

I felt like some of those schedules, I’d tell him, “Dave, you can’t do this. There’s too much on here. We’re not doing this today.” And he’d go, “I know, but…” His schedule was very aspirational. And I don’t say that to be flippant. He’s like, “We can do it!” I’m like, “Dave, we can’t do this. This isn’t going to work.”

The Fatal Day

On the day of the accident, your camera crew walked out over a dispute with the producers over housing accommodations. They wanted to be put up at a hotel closer to the set. As a result, there were delays the morning of the shooting as replacement camera operators were brought in. Do you think that was a distraction that contributed to the accident?

No, it had nothing to do with it. In that downtime, there was plenty of time for people to be doing things they needed to do. There was plenty of time for the armorer to be checking through ammunition, to be loading the weapons. There was no rush that morning. That day the pace was downright languid because we had one camera. I’m like, Forget this, we are not rushing today. What we finish, we finish, because the day was screwed anyway.

How did you feel about the camera-operator housing dispute? Their complaint was they were working long hours and then having to drive a long distance back to town.

I kept hoping the producers would blink and just say, “Fine, here’s some hotel rooms.” It was a stupid battle to try to win. [The crew workers] are out on dark roads, man. Someone could fall asleep. It’s 60 miles at one in the morning if you’re working at night. Just give them the damn room, you know?

After the shooting there was widely shared reporting that investigators later said was inaccurate. One false rumor that many people believed was that crew members were putting real bullets in the prop guns to shoot bottles and cans as amusement.

Some website ran with that on the day-of, I think, and said, “They were out shooting targets at lunch.” I remember thinking, Wouldn’t we have heard that? Guns make noise. Wouldn’t we have heard gunfire going? Even the cops talked about never seeing evidence of it. I never heard of anything that made me think that that happened.

People just ran with shit really quick. And it’s like, I don’t care if something makes us look good or look bad—let’s just be accurate. And there was no accuracy in a lot of that stuff. If they did it, it would’ve been the worst thing in the world, but that didn’t happen.

The shooting happened at a camera rehearsal just after lunch. What do you remember about coming back that afternoon? Tell me the story of what happened from that point up until you get shot.

I remember we didn’t quite finish the scene we were working on. We still needed a couple of little inserts. We were starting to pick those up when we came back. Close-ups, hands, that kind of stuff. The gun slides out. Cut to a tighter close-up. It cocks. Cut back to the guys talking to him.

And the scene shows Alec’s character wounded and holed up in the church. He’s surrounded by a posse that’s hunting him…

These guys are surrounding him and they’re talking to him, and you’re intercutting. You’re building tension. The marshal is coming in. Is [Baldwin’s character] dead? Is he alive? We had gotten off the Steadicam and were on the dolly tracks, and we were setting that shot up—what turned out to be the fateful shot, unfortunately.

How was it going?

There was a little disagreement about the approach. Again, just character stuff. Like, “Why doesn’t my character stand there?” I was trying to explain, “Please, just today, of all days, just do what I’m telling you.”

So the disagreement was between you and Alec, not you and Halyna?

Yeah, me and Alec. Again, this was just a little piece and we were going to have another little piece after that. Halyna had an idea for it, angle-wise, and I’m like, “Well, audition it for me. Let’s take a look.”

So they start setting all that up. We were in the middle of this aisle between pews, and there’s Alec and all these people. I’m bumping into 25 people. I’m in the way completely. This is always the case when you’re setting up a shot. He’s the only character at that point. But there’s grips and a lot of people in there. Wardrobe’s in and out, makeup. I decided to get out of the way. And I went outside.

Was it hot? You’re out in the desert. It’s October. Is it claustrophobic?

The church isn’t all that small, so no. But it’s a lot of people moving in tight spaces. It was a little hot and stuffy in there. I’d gone outside to get some fresh air and just sort of wait.

After Halyna set up the shot, you went back inside to check it.

I went inside and there’s a big crowd of people around. I couldn’t even see Alec. He was sitting in a pew. A half circle of people were encircling him. Everyone’s talking at the same time. There’s a little monitor that flips down from the side of the camera so I can get a look. I don’t know if [Halyna] was standing on the back of the dolly or if she was just standing behind the dolly.

“It Felt Like Someone Hit Me With a Bat”

You were standing right behind Halyna, trying to examine the shot on the camera. What happened next?

Things get a little fuzzy for me. I kept wanting to try to look over her right shoulder, to see that little monitor down below. To see what the angle looked like. But I couldn’t see over her. I got in behind her. When I tried to get a look, that’s when the gun fired. And then…yeah, all hell broke loose.

What do you remember about it? The noise, the feeling? Was it just total disorientation?

The noise was much louder. It sounded like a gunshot you hear in a movie. If you’ve heard quarter-and-a-half-load [blanks] fire, they’re a little loud, but they’re a poof and a pop. They sound more like a cap gun. They’re not going to blow your eardrum out. But this sounded like a magnum, like a Dirty Harry gun going off.

What did you feel?

It 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.

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.

When did you understand what happened?

It’s so disorienting. My ears were ringing. Your vision kind of does this, right? [Closes his hands in a small circle] It’s suddenly like you’re looking through a camera and you’re seeing people running around. There’s panic, and I’m sitting there going, “What…?”

My initial thought was that I was very angry. I was furious at that moment. I remember looking up and they were lowering Halyna to sit in front of me, and there was blood coming through her white shirt.

Who was helping you?

Matt Hemmer ran over. He was sparky [the crew nickname for electricians]. But Matt was a veteran and had a lot of medic training, so Matt took over with me. The set paramedic was in and out, going back and forth. Somebody said there was a hole in my shoulder. I remember one of the paramedics saying, “Is it normal for you to have a very large bump next to your spine?” And I said, “No.” There was just a lot of chaos.

And that was the fragment of the bullet?

The bullet had gone in and fractured part of my scapula, and then turned and went this way. [Traces from his right shoulder toward the center of his chest] The doctor kept telling me in Santa Fe, “You know how lucky you are?” And I’m like, “I don’t feel very fucking lucky.” It 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.

Did you ever lose consciousness?

I was always conscious. It felt like it just all happened so quickly. And I only remember, from when I was laying there, very specific flashes of things. They put me in the ambulance. They took Halyna away in the helicopter.

Do you know if she was still alive at that point?

Halyna is other people’s family. She was my friend, but she’s got a husband and son, and a mom and dad and sister. Those are things that are more their business to speak about.

Do you remember what Alec was doing after it happened?

I couldn’t tell you what anyone in there was doing, unless they had hands on me.

When did you find out that this had been fatal for Halyna?

I found out when I was in the hospital. I was in the ER still. It was much later. It was a very devastating moment, to say the least.

How did you find out?

I think I’ll keep that for me. But I did find out, and it was crushing in a way that is difficult to put into words. There was an emptiness and just an absolute devastation.

The Aftermath

I imagine you were grateful to be alive, but—

Not really.

No?

No, I wasn’t. 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. I remember just thinking, Maybe I’ll just sort of bleed to death—that would suit me just fine.

How did you feel the next morning when you did wake up?

I had hoped it was a bad dream. It was just the beginning of the aftermath, and the beginning of a lot of grief for everybody. I was trying to pick up the pieces, such as they can be picked up. There was still so much disbelief.

Was your family in New Mexico with you before all this?

No, this was during school, so my kids were at home back in California, and my wife flew out, obviously, when it happened. I’m also extraordinarily grateful they weren’t there when it happened. My kids were much younger then, obviously. My oldest is almost 16 now, but he was 13 at the time; my little one was eight at the time. I don’t know that they ever got the full picture of everything that happened until much, much later.

They knew that Dad got hurt at work and they knew that his really good friend died. My older one was a little more stoic about things, and my younger one, I think, was always very confused by it and sort of afraid of what happened. An unfortunate by-product of that is he worries about me a lot still. I hate that. I mean, do you want your kid worrying about you all the time?

Did you also speak with Halyna’s husband?

Matt Hutchins…I’m hesitant about speaking for the people who got hurt by this, but I’m going to tell you this about Matt Hutchins: Matt came out there as quickly as he could get out there, and he brought his son. He came there to take care of people. The man just lost his wife. If I lost my wife, I would be a quivering mass of Jell-O, and I would be lashing out in every direction I could. I wouldn’t be in my right mind. Matt came out there, and the job that he put on himself was to make sure people were okay. I’ve never seen anything like it.

I hated—as this thing went on—that he got harassed. The press would try to follow him and take pictures. I always felt like people turned on him, to some extent, when there was this settlement announced and he was going to be a producer on the movie. People were angry, and it’s like: Man, fuck you. Anybody who’s got a problem with Matt has a problem with goodness in general. This guy is way out of your league in terms of integrity and in terms of just emotional intelligence.

Who was he comforting?

Me, other people, Alec, other crew. He was there to hug people and listen to people and talk to people and tell them it was okay. There was a memorial; it was either one or two days after it happened, in the hotel where the crew was. Matt was there, and he was there to help people and heal. As awful as this has all been, I am very proud to know him.

How were you as weeks and months passed after the shooting?

I am not a person who had nightmares, and then I started having nightmares nightly, for over a year. They were just wake-me-up-in-a-cold-sweat kind of nightmares. Sometimes they were very formless and shapeless, and sometimes they were very specific. I went to a lot of therapy. It never worked for me. I believe that it can help others, and I envy the comfort it gives people. I wish I had something like that to hold on to. I just never did. And so I would go through six therapists. There’s a little bit of wandering in the woods that you’re left with after that.

When did that feeling of not wanting to survive go away?

You have responsibilities in life, and people you love that love you, and you want to be there for them. There were a lot of very rough times in the years since, and there are very rough times now.

The Media and the Courts

Have you followed the press coverage closely?

There’s been so much awfulness in the last almost three years now, and you can start to feel kind of commoditized—that you’re a punch line to some story or that you’re little more than just some sick form of mass entertainment for people. You want to believe that people are good—and people can be, and are—but you see an ugly side to how information is disseminated and consumed. How it’s reported to people. I don’t want to be one of those right-wing cranks who says, “The media lies to you.” Then you’ll read some article and you’re like, That’s fucking wrong. Then you see the justice system go to work.

We saw a number of cases. Dave Halls took a plea bargain for negligence with a handgun. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Baldwin was charged with that, but the case was dismissed. In your opinion, was justice done?

I don’t know, and I don’t know what that even is anymore—I’ll be very honest with you about that. No one feels good about someone going to jail. If you feel good about that, take a hard look in the mirror.

Do you blame anyone?

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. 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 chose to answer for that. I think blame can be toxic to your soul—not that people don’t deserve blame.

After all the investigating, it seems as though the cause is fairly simple: The armorer put a live bullet into the prop gun.

The live bullet got put in the gun. 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.

Investigators found five other live rounds of ammunition mingled among Rust’s props on the day of the shooting, including one in Baldwin’s holster and one in the bandolier worn by Jensen Ackles, who played the US marshal. Do you know if live bullets were circulating around set even before that day?

The prosecutors were able to go into some very fine detail in some of the imagery and find the caps on the back of these bullets and say, “That one was real. On this day, we know there was a bullet floating around because you can see it.” They were clearly there and it’s really frightening. At the hospital, the doctor was like, “You have a bullet in you.” And I was just like, “What the hell are you talking about? You’re wrong.” I kept explaining that I’d come from a movie set and it’s not possible for there to be a real bullet on a movie set. It’s not allowed. You can’t have it. This is the biggest sin you could ever commit on a movie set.

There was debate about whether Alec Baldwin should have been charged. There are actors who insist he should have checked the gun himself; there are others who say that if you have an armorer and you have an assistant director who is telling you it’s safe, you should be able to trust that. Where do you fall on this?

My recommendation is this: that no guns should ever be allowed. Nothing real that can fire anything. It should all be fake from here on to eternity. And there should still be armorers even because it’s fake, because they’re still not safe unless there’s an armorer.

An armorer to ensure the fakeness of the guns, in other words?

Yeah. On the second go-round, the second iteration of Rust, Andy Wert, our armorer, [ensured] these things were profoundly inert. They might as well have been paperweights that we were using. Nothing could be fired from them in any way, shape, or form. [The firing] was done digitally. And sorry, I’ve digressed pretty far off what you were asking me…

Do you think it was reasonable to trust the process?

It’s a process that has worked for years and years and years. The armorers, in general, in this business, are devoted professionals, and I hate that their profession has gotten dinged by this.

But do you think Alec behaved recklessly? Did he deserve what he was accused of?

I don’t know. Again, it’s a cop-out to say it’s not up to me, but it’s not. Does it matter if I think it’s fair or not? There is an argument that says, if he checks it and starts fiddling around with it, he’s creating a safety issue. And then there is another thing that says, it’s common sense, Jesus Christ. Be careful with this goddamn thing. So I don’t know anymore, to be honest with you. The charges got filed. That’s what they decided to do. Was he overcharged? I don’t know.

Since his case was dismissed on a technicality, do you feel there was sufficient resolution to the question?

There is resolution to it, in a strange way. Maybe more of a finality than a resolution. After the Hannah Gutierrez-Reed verdict was delivered, I went and crawled into bed and pulled the covers over my head. I just felt awful in general. Everything that bubbles up from this movie is just devastating.

I have no qualms about talking about this, but I’m going to be down the rabbit hole for the next week. It just takes me to places that are awful. When things happened, the best way I can put it is, I have tried to remove myself from result thinking. 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. I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to evade you on it. I just—I don’t know what this means anymore.

Finishing Rust

You agreed to return to finish Rust. Was there a financial or insurance obligation where the people who invested money don’t get resolution unless you actually finish the film? Why complete it—practically, emotionally, and personally?

The people that have money on the line—I don’t give a damn if they ever get a penny or not. It was a long time afterward that somebody floated the idea of: Would you be willing to come back? The answer was no. No, no, no, no. Never ever. In fact, there was a very long period of time where I thought I was just done ever doing this for a living.

What changed your mind?

At a certain point it was conveyed to me that there was going to be some form of settlement and that Matt Hutchins was going to be involved as a producer. This is what he wanted. I knew that the movie being finished would financially benefit Halyna’s family, which is very important to me. 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.

She’d want it to be finished?

I don’t ever want to speak for someone who can’t speak for themselves, but I do feel confident in saying that she would have wanted her last work to have been seen. 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.

So you felt you would be the best equipped to do that?

The idea that they would go forward without me and have a stranger try to honor her final work was something I don’t think I could live with. I didn’t want to [return], really, and I can’t say that it was a good experience for me doing it, but I did. And I’m glad I did. I’m extremely proud of the movie that we ended up with.

Now you’re glad you returned?

I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do. I don’t know. For people who didn’t like that I did that—they’re right. And for people who like that I did it—they’re right. I just couldn’t let somebody else finish what she and I started. I just couldn’t.

What becomes of that scene you were shooting in the chapel when the accident happened?

It vanishes in its entirety.

The whole scene is gone?

Gone. Not just that, but also a few things leading up to it. Everything needed to be entirely reconceived there. There were a few things that came before that now wouldn’t make story sense. So we just sort of eliminated it and came up with something entirely different. I’m not going back to that. I’m glad you asked. I don’t want anyone who ever does see this to be waiting for that. No one ever pushed to keep anything like that.

Some recasting was also necessary. Your young actors had to be recast because they grew up in the years between. But also Jensen Ackles chose not to return and was recast as the US marshal. That means some of the footage you and Halyna shot involving him can’t be used, though, right?

I want to be very measured here in how I say this. People chose what they chose for the reasons that they had. The whole ballgame for me was just to preserve every frame [of Halyna’s work] and [having to recast] prevented that in some heartbreaking ways. We were able to still keep a lot, obviously. I don’t want to be diplomatic about it, but I’m going to be diplomatic.

Who replaced him?

Josh Hopkins, who is a good friend, and he had been doing a different part before and did wonderful work for me on Crown Vic. It made perfect sense for everyone. It’s like he was part of the family. It is hands down the best work of his career. And I hope people talk about that.

What were your discussions with Alec about returning? I assume your relationship changed after the shooting.

Yeah. I had to make it crystal clear that if I’m coming back, creatively I am going to have what I want. There was not going to be a discussion about it, and that’s that.

When did you first see Alec after the shooting? Did he visit you in the hospital?

He came to sit with me the day after. He was a wreck. How could you not be?

What was it like working together again when Rust was in its second iteration?

I was just all over the place emotionally during that whole second shoot.

What was your experience working with the crew?

Every Friday night, I wanted to have crew over to watch a movie, and I was going to make everybody dinner. We started doing that. I made them watch Streets of Fire, and we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then there were paparazzi hiding in the trees, trying to get on set. And somebody had taken pictures among the crew down on the set. I had to cancel movie night because I couldn’t trust anybody anymore. To take them into where I lived? How can I trust people now? There was that kind of stuff.

Tell me about working with your new cinematographer, Bianca Cline.

She didn’t know Halyna, but they knew of each other. Bianca was one of the people I’d interviewed originally, and I liked her a great deal. Bianca is the most positive thing that came out of this for me. She is downright heroic in ways that people might not understand.

How so?

You know where she is right now [the day after Baldwin’s case was dismissed]? She’s in Kyiv. She’s with Halyna’s mom. She hadn’t met Halyna, but she felt a deep personal connection. She flew into a fucking war zone because she knew that [Halyna’s mother] was going to be hurting this week. She has been with her for four days because that’s who Bianca Cline is.

How did you two connect when it came time to finish the movie?

Bianca reached out to me. She texted me and said, “I’m the person to do this.” There was a great deal of fear among the camera-department community about coming back to work on this movie. People were afraid of how their peers might see them. Again, I don’t ever want to begrudge people their feelings on this. But that was something that they would obviously have to navigate, and she would obviously be front and center in that.

She reassured people?

She had a very difficult time putting together that team because the situation was so fraught. Then she led them—and led us all—by example, by her demeanor. She carried me through a lot of very difficult times. But she does it with grace and elegance and integrity and creativity.

How did Bianca’s work blend with Halyna’s?

She danced a duet with somebody, but they danced it a year and a half apart. That’s the way I look at her and Halyna’s work. A lot of times, in fact, it’s shots within the same scene. One shot is one actor [from behind] then the turnaround we did a year and a half later in a different state, with different people, different everything. She pulled all that off.

What’s the status of Rust now?

The movie’s done. Now it’s been done since March.

Has it been difficult finding a distributor?

Some of the trades, at the end of these articles, they always put this thing in there about how the movie’s been shopped and no one’s picked it up. That’s not true. But they keep adding that as some sort of allusion to the quality of a movie they have never seen, because there’s an agenda that Rust is bad.

What is the truth?

It hasn’t been shopped. [Producers] were at Cannes last year in 2023; maybe they were selling foreign territories, but that’s what you do. And foreign territories have been sold on the movie. It’s up to sales and the producers. They’ll have to figure out what the best way is for it to get out and when.

What is your relationship now with Alec Baldwin?

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.

When people can see Rust, is there something in the film you feel is a particularly beautiful moment that Halyna helped create?

One of them was our first morning. The sun was coming up, and we were going to have some stunt doubles out on the horses riding, just to get some atmosphere. We had them go out and ride this range, and they’ve got a minute-long ride coming back to us.

Halyna’s there. I’m there. It was just a small camera crew. The guys are riding back to us, and we’re just talking. I looked over at the monitor, because we’d just cut, and there’s this shot of these horses coming toward us. The sun’s coming up behind them. They’re in silhouette, and their shadow is projected in front of them on the dust. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I started tapping Halyna, like, “Whoa, whoa. Roll, roll, roll. Let’s get this.” We found the most beautiful shot in the movie by a complete accident.

When the movie comes out, do you think it might be hard for people to separate it from real life? Even the notions of accountability and judgment and mercy and fatal accidents are part of the story of Rust.

It’s in there. When I write, I’m very interested in consequences as a story device—and how those can ripple through time and how people can pay the consequences for things that didn’t even involve them. I use a rifle as the vehicle for that. It’s a family heirloom that’s been passed down from generation to generation. This rifle, in a real sense, has destroyed the lives of anyone who’s ever picked it up.

There’s the obvious strange alignment of this movie being about a boy who accidentally shoots someone. That is inescapable. When people hear that, they are very taken aback. I think that is the most glaring thing.

What would you like people who see it to know about Halyna?

She used to always say: “What can we do to make this better?” Man, for every single setup, that was her mantra. She’d look at it, we’re ready to go, and she’d say: “What’s that little extra 10% we could do?” That just applies to everything. It’s a philosophy. Whether she was aware of it or not, she lived by it. And I think that is worth talking about.