The fatal “Rust” shooting “ruined” director Joel Souza.
Souza, 55, was shot in the shoulder when a gun that Alec Baldwin was holding fired on the Bonanza Creek Ranch set on Oct. 21, 2021. The on-set shooting led to the death of “Rust” cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think,” Souza told Vanity Fair. “I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins. I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.”
“It’s not like I was in love with the guy I was before, anyway,” he added. “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.”
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While the cast and crew – including Souza – returned to finish filming “Rust,” the fatal scene was thrown out.
“Not just that, but also a few things leading up to it,” Souza revealed. “Everything needed to be entirely re-conceived 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.”
Baldwin returned to star in the Western, but Souza has “no relationship” with the actor following the tragedy.
“Getting through it was tough. We got through it. I got the performance I wanted,” he explained. “We’re not friends. We’re not enemies. There’s no relationship.”
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Baldwin was criminally charged in connection with the fatal shooting, but his case was dismissed mid-trial after the judge found the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense.
“The state’s willful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate,” Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said inside the New Mexico courthouse. “If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice.”
“There is no way for the court to right this wrong.”
Baldwin cannot be charged again. However, “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed is currently serving time after a jury found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in March.
She was sentenced to 18 months in prison but is planning to appeal her conviction.
Souza described the moment he was shot during his testimony in Gutierrez Reed’s trial. The director recalled what he was doing in the moments right before the gun went off. Hutchins and Souza were working to stage a close-up scene involving Baldwin and a revolver, when the gun the actor was holding discharged – killing the cinematographer.
“I went inside [the church] again to see, to try to see what the angle was, there were a lot of voices,” he recalled during his testimony. “I heard Alec’s voice. I heard Halyna’s voice, everyone sort of talking at once. I don’t have a clear memory of how long I was standing behind her. I know I got up behind her to . . . try to see on the monitor, and there was an incredibly loud bang that was not like the half and quarter loads you hear on a set. Those are sort of, they’re loud poofs and pops. This was deafening.”
“And it felt like somebody had taken a baseball bat to my shoulder. I remember that distinctly and sort of stumbling back and shouting. I don’t remember exactly what I said.”
The set became “very chaotic” immediately after the shooting.
“I remember them laying me down. I remember them laying her down next to me, although we were sort of facing in opposite directions. My head was this way, her head was that way. I remember a lot of panic. I still just couldn’t figure out what had happened. I just I thought, ‘Was there something that had been stuck in the barrel that came out?’ but just nothing made sense.”
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