In the spring of 2023, about 18 months after a live bullet passed through cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’ chest and lodged in writer-director Joel Souza’s shoulder during the making of Rust, Souza was back on the set of the indie Western, waiting to call action. He and his crew were setting up a crane shot of two characters riding horses through the snow in a picturesque river valley in southern Montana, and Souza paused to make some remarks. “I remember saying that it would annoy Halyna that we were standing around not shooting, so let’s go shoot,” Souza says. “As soon as that first shot finished, I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this is making movies. This is the part I know. This part makes sense.’ ”
Very little else had made sense since Oct. 21, 2021, the day the Colt revolver held by Alec Baldwin discharged the bullet that killed Hutchins, 42, launching a criminal investigation, multiple civil lawsuits and a media feeding frenzy. In the months after her death, Hutchins’ widower, Matthew Hutchins, reached a settlement agreement with Rust producers including Baldwin. And as part of that agreement, the film had gone forward, with Matthew named as executive producer and with his and Halyna’s son, Andros, who was 9 when Halyna died, to benefit financially from its eventual sale.
Souza is not a producer and has not been named in the multiple civil lawsuits filed by family and crew that followed Hutchins’ death. But the task fell to him, to new cinematographer Bianca Cline, and to a cast and crew of about 250 people to complete Rust, which they did using fake guns, a modified script that removed the scene during which Hutchins was killed, and two on-set safety supervisors. Now that the troubled movie is finally finished and set to premiere in late November at Camerimage, the Toruń, Poland-set festival that celebrates cinematographers, Souza and Cline will be the first people to face an audience on behalf of Rust. It’s a heavy burden, one that will see them answering to critics who consider it macabre and exploitative to finish and screen this film, even as Hutchins’ family members in the U.S. and in her native Ukraine quietly support the effort.
Rust producers have only made one of their settlement payments to the Hutchins family, using insurance money, but Matthew Hutchins still backs the completion of the film, according to two sources with knowledge of his thinking. “The profitability of the movie will trigger the payments to the family,” says Melina Spadone, general counsel for Thomasville Pictures, the company owned by Rust producers Ryan Smith and Allen Cheney.
When Camerimage announced Oct. 3 that it would premiere Rust, the festival said the screening would serve as a starting point for conversations about women in cinematography and safety on sets. But some industry figures have criticized the move, including Rachel Morrison, the Oscar-nominated DP of Black Panther, who commented on Instagram, “I’m all for memorializing Halyna and her beautiful work, but not by screening and thereby promoting the film that killed her.” Normal People cinematographer Suzie Lavelle posted as well, asking the festival to “Reconsider please.”
“There are people out there who have very strong feelings that we shouldn’t have done it [finished Rust],” Souza says, speaking during an interview with Cline in Los Angeles in late October, the morning after they uploaded the digital print of Rust to the festival’s servers in Poland. “I’m not going to try to change their minds. Just understand that we are here because we want to honor her. We want to showcase her work. We want it not to just disappear.”
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In an eerie parallel between fiction and reality, Rust tells the story of a 13-year-old boy who accidentally kills a rancher in 1880s Wyoming and goes on the run with his grandfather, Baldwin’s Harland Rust. On the afternoon Hutchins was killed, the production was rehearsing inside a church set on the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Souza had leaned in to see the camera angle that Hutchins was setting up of Baldwin sitting in a church pew, and Baldwin was practicing a crossdraw of the gun, which was supposed to be loaded with dummy rounds. How a live bullet got onto the set of a movie remains the core unsolved mystery of Rust despite two criminal trials and an investigation by New Mexico’s safety board.
The sensation of that bullet entering Souza’s shoulder felt like being hit with a baseball bat, and for an agonizing period of several minutes while first an overwhelmed set medic and then emergency personnel attempted to help them, Hutchins and Souza lay on the dirt floor of the church looking at each other. “She had the biggest brown eyes I’d ever seen,” Souza said while testifying at the February trial of armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who is now serving an 18-month prison sentence for involuntary manslaughter and awaiting an appeal. Doctors at one hospital pronounced Hutchins dead at 3:48 p.m., while doctors at another removed the bullet from Souza’s shoulder, where it had narrowly missed hitting his spine.
Souza, who says he has suffered from anxiety for most of his life, has been to seven therapists since the shooting and undergone EMDR, a psychotherapy technique that helps people process trauma. “I run out of things to say eventually, and I feel like I don’t quite know how to do it,” he says of therapy. “That little voice in my head says, ‘This doesn’t work,’ but it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying.”
After the Hutchins family reached its wrongful death settlement with Rust’s producers in 2022, Souza rewrote the script to remove the church sequence and the buildup to it, an attempt to deter audiences from watching out of morbid curiosity. “I don’t want anybody ever thinking, ‘Here comes the scene,’ ” Souza says. “It’s sort of toward the finale of the movie, and so there’s a lot of things that are all coming to a head at that one point.”
When the producers began to think about staffing up for the new shoot, Souza braced himself for rejection by the industry. “I just never knew what to expect when approaching people about coming to work on it,” he says. “I’d always have this horrible feeling, like they’re going to see my name in their phone and go, ‘Oh no, Rust.’ ” Cline, who is best known for being the director of photography on the 2021 live action/stop-motion film Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, had applied to the cinematography job on Rust the first time around and lost out to Hutchins, with whom she shared an agent and some close friends. One of Halyna’s best friends, documentarian Rachel Mason, who is making a film about Halyna and remains close with the Hutchins family, knew Rust would be going forward before it was made public and reached out to Cline to tell her she should be the one to shoot it, that she had both the right aesthetic sensibility and the emotional strength for the job.
“I’d never met another DP who reminded me more of Halyna,” Mason says. After their conversation, Cline says, “I stayed in my apartment for three days just sitting there, like, ‘Could I do that? Why would I do that?’ Eventually, I decided it was the right thing to do. I thought, ‘If I had died, I would want Halyna to do it.’ ” When Cline sent Souza a long text expressing her interest, “It sort of made me think, ‘Oh, maybe there is kindness out there about [Rust],’ ” Souza says.
Cline says she had a hard time hiring her camera crew. “Even people who thought it was a great idea that we were finishing the film were like, ‘I can’t be associated with that,’ because there was such a stigma,” she says. “When I took the film, I did it knowing I might never work again.” Cline has shot another movie in Europe since making Rust, and she continues to get steady work shooting commercials, but standing up for Rust at its festival premiere will mean being associated with the project in a highly public way. “This might be my last movie,” Cline says. “I might be blackballed.”
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More than half of the shots in the finished film, Souza and Cline say, are Hutchins’ work. “It pained me every time we had to lose any images from Halyna,” says Cline, who worked with Hutchins’ gaffer, Serge Svetnoy, to replicate her lighting choices, selecting lamps, for instance, similar to ones Hutchins had used. She referenced the look book Hutchins had created for the film, which included paintings by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico and German expressionists, and heavy use of silhouette. “It was so fascinating for a Western. It’s not just beautiful landscapes. It was way more about the people,” Cline says. Sometimes preserving Hutchins’ work meant matching half of a conversation that had been shot on the original New Mexico set to another half shot in Montana; other times it meant relying on visual effects. “There were things where, this is a beautiful shot she did, but we don’t have this actor anymore,” Souza says. “So let’s replace his head digitally and let’s reshoot our other actor in front of a greenscreen so we can keep her shot there and just replace this little tiny piece of it. We’re an indie, so we have to get a little creative in how we do that. But I defy anyone to show me where we did it.” (Rust had a budget of about $7.5 million).
Rust’s primary legacy in the film industry is more likely to be practical than artistic — it caused many people in Hollywood to rethink the long-standing practice of using working firearms on sets. “One of my goals with finishing the film was to show how safe a set can be,” Cline says. “Doing it this way, with no functioning weapons, is such a good thing. With the way that CGI is now and the cheapness of it, there’s absolutely no reason why we should be using real guns.” Hutchins’ death led to the creation of a new safety committee in the DGA and a new law in California, which in 2023 became the first state to create regulations around the use of firearms on productions, requiring that armorers be permitted and that they have no other duties on a set besides the management of guns.
In addition to Gutierrez-Reed’s prison sentence, Rust’s first AD, Dave Halls, who handed the gun to Baldwin, took a plea deal for the charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon and was sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation. In July, halfway through a dramatic trial, a Santa Fe judge dismissed an involuntary manslaughter case against Baldwin based on police and prosecutors withholding evidence from the defense. Though that closed the most high-profile chapter of Rust — the possibility that a major movie star could go to prison for his role in Hutchins’ death — Baldwin and the film’s other producers still face civil lawsuits. Svetnoy, the gaffer who held Hutchins as she bled on the church floor, is suing the producers for negligence. Script supervisor Mamie Mitchell, who called 911 from the set, is part of a lawsuit brought with Hutchins’ Ukrainian mother, father and sister against Baldwin for assault and battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and against all of the producers for negligence.
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After Baldwin’s trial, Souza says he did not feel a sense of closure. “It just sort of abruptly ended, and I thought to myself, ‘This part of it is over,’ ” Souza explains. “I’m at a crossroads, and does it consume me and eat me up forever and just sort of wreck the rest of my life, or can I find a way to move forward with it rather than from it?” Souza has been working on other scripts since he finished Rust but has not yet sold any projects.
Rust has sold in some foreign territories, and producers are still seeking a U.S. distributor. Had it not been for Hutchins’ death on set, the movie likely would have followed a path similar to the 2023 Nicolas Cage indie Western The Old Way, which received a limited theatrical release and found its audience primarily through home entertainment. The financial path forward for Rust is much less clear, with its tragic history both a potential attractant and repellent for audiences. Souza and Cline are trying to figure out the most respectful way to participate in the process of promoting the film. “We’ve talked about this for two years of, like, ‘Wait, do we do no press? Do we do lots of press?’ ” Cline says. “I desperately want to say, ‘Guys, go see Halyna’s film.’ ” After the Camerimage premiere, they are scheduled to participate in a panel discussion with Hutchins’ mentor, American Society of Cinematographers president Stephen Lighthill.
Cline has taken some comfort from meetings with Hutchins’ mother, Olga Solovey, in L.A. and Kiev (she has remained in Ukraine during the war). “You lose your daughter, but nobody particularly wants to talk about Halyna — they want to talk about Alec and the trials,” Cline says of Solovey, who is expected to attend the premiere in Poland. “Talking to Olga, she was grateful that we had finished the film. I thought, ‘OK, the whole world can hate me and not understand why we did it. Olga understands. I’m happy that she’s happy.’ ”
This story appeared in the Nov. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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