Rust Director Joel Souza breaks his silence Vanity Fair It's about the tragic 2021 shooting that injured and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Souza was injured when a gun held by actor Alec Baldwin misfired on the set of a low-budget Western in October 2021. Hutchins was shot in the chest, the bullet passing through his body and hitting Souza in the shoulder. The director said the bullet “missed my lung by this much. Luckily, it stopped about that far from my spine. It was protruding through the skin, so it caused a big bump.”
Souza said the impact “felt like a horse kicking me in the shoulder or someone hitting me with a stick… My whole right side of my body went numb, completely numb, but it also hurt like hell, if that makes sense,” he explained. “Like everything was tingly and numb, but it hurt like hell at the same time. And I staggered back and I was on my knees or my butt and I was just… yelling. I don't even know what I was yelling.”
Contrary to what friends and family often told him after the incident, Souza did not feel lucky to be alive. He admitted that in the hours after Hutchins died, he wished he had “bled out during the night” because “I never wanted to be around him again.”
“It was a very difficult moment,” Souza said. “I just remember thinking, 'Maybe I'll bleed to death—that would suit me very well.'”
Three years later, the director is still struggling to process the tragedy. “When I tell someone it destroyed me, I don't mean it in the way people generally think,” Souza said. “I don't mean it destroyed my career. Who I was, internally, was suddenly gone. It was over.”
She continued: “I wasn't in love with the guy I was in love with before. You look in the mirror the next day and there's someone else there. One day I didn't know anything about the world and now I do. And none of it is good.”
Souza explained that one of the things that stuck with him about the incident was “who was holding the gun.” The director recalled watching Baldwin as a young child The Hunt for Red October and I thought, 'Hey, that guy… one day [we’ll work together].'”
Baldwin and Souza reunited earlier this year RustAlthough Souza has stated that the two had “no relationship”, they both wanted to finish the film so that they could donate distribution proceeds to Hutchins' family.
“That was tough to handle,” Souza said of the second half of the production. “We got through that. I got the performance I wanted,” he said of Baldwin, adding, “We're not friends. We're not enemies. There's no relationship.”
Souza and Rust's producers have not yet released the film to potential buyers, but the director hopes that when audiences see it, they will see Hutchins' immense talent rather than the saga of his tragic death. Out of respect for the late cinematographer, Souza brought in another cinematographer “from Hutchins' circle” to complete the job. He also cut the scene where he is killed and altered other scenes to reflect his absence.
“As a cinematographer, if this was going to make sense, Halyna would be out of my reach, but it's not,” Souza said. “He should be making big studio movies. He should be getting too big for a movie as big as ours. He should be making $100 million movies, not $7.5 million movies. Everyone who worked with him knew what he had and what he was all about.”