Read this: Rust director Joel Souza gives first interview since the shooting

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.)

He also relives the day of the shooting minute-by-minute in a truly harrowing account of why you should never hear a sound like “a gunshot you hear in a movie” on an actual movie set. “It felt like a horse kicked me in the shoulder or someone hit me with a bat. The whole right side of my body went numb, completely numb, but it also hurt excruciatingly at the same time, if that makes sense,” he explains of the bullet fragment that ricocheted into his body, among other first-person details of the chaos and fear that ensued in the aftermath.

But while he says he was “furious at that moment,” he’s come to a pretty profound place regarding his feelings of anger and blame in the months since. “When there are matters of things like ammunition and guns and safety, you don’t fuck around there. You just don’t,” he said. “And so the armorer (Hannah Gutierrez-Reed) had to answer for her role in that… I think blame can be toxic to your soul—not that people don’t deserve blame.” Still, “No one feels good about someone going to jail. If you feel good about that, take a hard look in the mirror,” he added when asked if he thought justice had been done.

As anyone would have guessed, the whole experience radically altered the trajectory of Souza’s life. “When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think… I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped,” he said. “It’s not like I was in love with the guy I was before, anyway. You look in the mirror the day after that happens, and now there’s somebody else there. I didn’t know things about the world one day, and now I do. And none of them are good.”

You can (and should) read the whole interview at Vanity Fair.