Rust director testifies that armorer apologized to him after he was shot

Joel Souza, director of Rust, testified in the trial of the film’s armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed on Friday, per Deadline. Souza was injured on set when a gun wielded by star Alec Baldwin went off. The incident with the prop gun, which for reasons still unknown contained a live round, killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins; Souza recalled on the stand seeing Hutchins laid on the ground next to him after the shooting, “and her looking back at me and she had the biggest brown eyes I had ever seen.”

Souza testified that he “didn’t see anybody give” the gun to Baldwin amid the busyness of the set. (First assistant director David Halls, who pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge in the incident, testified that Gutierrez-Reed gave Baldwin the gun.) He said he didn’t “ have a clear memory of how long I was standing behind” Hutchins in the moments before the shooting, but “I know I got behind her to try to see on the monitor, and there was an incredibly loud bang, that was not like the half and quarter loads you hear on a set. Those are sort of, they are loud poofs and pops. This was deafening. And it felt like somebody had taken a baseball bat to my shoulder. I remember that distinctly, and sort of stumbling back and shouting, I don’t remember exactly what I said.”

The director remembered there being “a lot of panic” after seeing Hutchins laid out and bleeding. “I still just couldn’t figure out what had happened. I thought, ‘Was there something stuck in the barrel that came out?’ But just nothing made sense.”

Per ABC News, Gutierrez-Reed told police in the aftermath of the shooting that she had left the set before the actual shooting due to the film’s COVID-19 protocols; Souza testified that he was unaware of any such protocol, but would have expected her to be present for a shooting scene: “The armorer would be where the gun is.” While he was uncertain if she was there when the gun went off, he testified that he saw her among the gathered crew members after he was injured, and “She looked distraught. And I remember her saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry Joel.’ And I remember somebody just screaming at her and they just ushered her out.”

Souza wanted to be taken to the same hospital as Hutchins, but was told it wasn’t possible. When he arrived at the hospital, he couldn’t believe he’d actually been shot: “It just could not compute for me. I just kept saying, ‘You don’t understand. No, no, no. This is a movie set. That’s not possible….It’s just not possible there’s a live round,” he said. “They eventually grew tired of my protesting about it. They showed me an X-ray of my back and there was a very large bullet in it.”