The Western “Rust” got its world premiere on Wednesday at a Polish film festival, three years after its cinematographer was killed in an on-set shooting.
Hollywood star Alec Baldwin was accused of violating gun safety rules in the 2021 death of Halyna Hutchins, but his involuntary manslaughter trial collapsed earlier this year.
Hutchins’s mother refused to attend the premiere “when there is still no justice for my daughter”.
“Baldwin continues to increase my pain with his refusal to apologise to me and take responsibility for her death,” Olga Solovey said Tuesday.
Director Joel Souza, who was wounded in the shooting, introduced the movie at the Camerimage film festival — known for celebrating cinematography — in Torun, northern Poland.
He told AFP the “massive devastation” of the shooting had left him an emotional wreck.
“‘Rust’ just became this sort of insane hurricane,” he said. “You’re just left to sort of pick up the pieces.”
The filmmaker admitted that he agonised over whether to complete the movie.
“I was definitely on the fence… There was a time when I thought I just didn’t want to make movies anymore,” he said.
He said what convinced him to finish it was learning that Hutchins’s husband wanted her final work to be seen.
Camerimage said it was also Hutchins’s “dream” to have her work shown at the festival.
The premiere was preceded by a minute of silence for Hutchins, whom Souza described as “a real joy to know” and “someone who spoke Westerns very well”.
– Rapid rise –
Baldwin, 66, did not attend the festival.
The Emmy-winning actor was holding a revolver during a rehearsal on set in New Mexico when a live round was fired, fatally wounding 42-year-old Hutchins.
In a tragic irony, the film centres on an accidental killing — a parallel that Souza called “unsettling”.
“It’s a strange one to unpack. When people hear about it, they generally fall silent for a few moments because they can’t believe” it, he said.
Souza and Baldwin developed the script from Souza’s on the youngest person ever to be hanged in the Old West.
“Rust” tells the story of an outlaw who rides to rescue his 13-year-old grandson from execution for an accident being treated as murder.
The film’s armourer, Hannah Gutierrez, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter for accidentally loading Baldwin’s prop gun with a live round.
Baldwin’s trial spectacularly collapsed in July when it emerged that prosecutors had not turned over a batch of bullets that detectives had found during their investigation.
Filming was halted by the fatal incident, but completed last year on location in Montana.
Hutchins, a former journalist from Ukraine who grew up on a Soviet military base, had been named as one of the industry’s rising stars in 2019 by American Cinematographer magazine.
Cinematographer Bianca Cline, who took over from Hutchins, said her job was just a matter of “copying what she did”, including by using the same lenses and matching the lighting.
She said they tried to retain as many of Hutchins’s frames as possible.
– Controversy around women –
While the tragedy prompted some calls for banning firearms from sets altogether, new Hollywood guidelines now specify that only an armourer can hand a weapon to an actor.
Prosecutors said Baldwin was handed the gun on set by the film’s first assistant director, who later pleaded guilty to negligent use of a deadly weapon.
Souza said “the safety bulletin doesn’t go quite far enough. I think they should mandate that no real weapons be used.”
The “Rust” premiere is not the only controversy at the festival, whose jury is headed this year by Oscar winner Cate Blanchett.
French director Coralie Fargeat pulled her movie starring Demi Moore, “The Substance” — which won best screenplay at Cannes — “after discovering the highly misogynistic and offensive words” of festival founder Marek Zydowicz.
Zydowicz appeared to suggest that including more women cinematographers might lead to “mediocre film production” in the line-up.
The remarks, for which Zydowicz later apologised, also led Oscar-winning British director Steve McQueen to stay away in protest at what he called the “deeply offensive words”.
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