Read this: Rust director Joel Souza gives first interview since the shooting
Souza was also injured by the bullet that killed Halyna Hutchins
Photo: Jim Spellman/Getty Images
In the wake of Alec Baldwin’s bizarrely truncated trial—and armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s extremely messy one—Rust director Joel Souza is finally opening up about his own experience on that fateful day. (To the press, that is. He testified in the trial of armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed in March.) “There’s a lot of people who know a lot of very specific things about all of it, but in a weird way, I feel like I’m the person who knows the most about all of it,” he told Vanity Fair in the beginning of a lengthy interview that took almost four hours to complete.
The interview gets into the nitty gritty of everything that led up to that moment and everything—at least the things that Souza was willing to speak about without crossing any personal boundaries—that came after. He profiles his relationship with Alec Baldwin before filming started (“He was always very good to me and very deferential to my creative instincts and incredibly supportive, creatively, of me.”) and in the aftermath (“We’re not friends. We’re not enemies. There’s no relationship.”), as well as the true friendship he shared with Halyna Hutchins before her death. (“She was too cool for me to know her,” he shared.)