The director of “Rust” has spoken out for the first time in depth about the on-set shooting that nearly killed him and took the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Joel Souza and Hutchins were both shot when Alec Baldwin’s prop gun went off during a rehearsal on the set of the Western film in October 2021. In a new interview, the director, 51, revealed that in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, he wished he would “bleed out” because he “didn’t want to be around anymore.”
To this day, the tragedy has left him feeling “ruined.”
“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think. I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins,” Souza told Vanity Fair. “I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.”
“The doctor kept telling me in Santa Fe, ‘You know how lucky you are?’” the director recalled after the accident.
“And I’m like, ‘I don’t feel very f–king lucky.’ It missed my lung by this much. It stopped about that far away from my spine, fortunately.”
When asked if he was grateful to be alive while he recovered in the hospital, Souza replied, “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,” he added.
“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.’”
As weeks and months passed, Souza continued to struggle.
“I am not a person who had nightmares, and then I started having nightmares nightly, for over a year,” he said.
“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.”
He continued, “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.”
Today, the feeling of “not wanting to be around anymore” seems to have subsided, in part, at least.
“You have responsibilities in life, and people you love that love you, and you want to be there for them,” he explained. “There were a lot of very rough times in the years since, and there are very rough times now.”
Baldwin, who is also a producer on “Rust,” has maintained that he never pulled the trigger of the prop gun. According to investigators, the weapon contained a live round of ammunition when it should have only included a “blank.”
The movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Baldwin was also charged with involuntary manslaughter, but his trial was tossed in July after the judge in the case decided that evidence had been mishandled by local law enforcement.
Though initially reluctant to complete the film, Souza changed his mind because he felt “confident” that Hutchins “would have wanted her last work to be seen.”
However, the scene in the movie that was being rehearsed when the shooting occurred will not be in the final cut. “It vanishes in its entirety,” he said.
