Alec Baldwin's Western rust received polite applause at the film's
controversial world premiere. The screening at a low-key film
festival in Poland on Wednesday comes 3 years after the
accidental death of the film's cinematographer Helena Hutchins, who
died when a live round was fired from a gun
Baldwin pointed at her. To come and celebrate my
friend, the bullet also wounded director Joel Souza,
who said he hoped the film's completion would be seen
as a tribute to Hutchins. It wasn't an easy
decision by any means, but uh. It became
important to me. And important to her husband that
people see her final work people may be learning more
about her than simply what happened to her. And
people getting to see the world through her eyes.
While filming Rust in October of 2021, Baldwin fired
a live round inadvertently loaded by the movie's chief weapons
handler, Hanna Gutierrez. A judge dismissed involuntary manslaughter
charges against Baldwin. But Gutierrez is serving an 18
month prison sentence. Souza said the church scene they
were working on when the deadly shot was fired has
been taken out of the film. It's just gone
. It doesn't exist anymore. They were, we
were never gonna finish that so it we. When
we were coming back, I changed the script and
so I wiped that out of it's just wiped out
of existence. But Soua acknowledged that it will be
hard for audiences to not think about Hutchin's death while
watching the film. I think it'll be next to
impossible for people to do that. I mean,
people are as human beings, it's human nature.
How can you not? How could you possibly separate
it from from what happened? I think that's how
people even know about the movie, and I hope
they can at least take something from it or they
can appreciate her work in it.