The cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed on Thursday when the actor Alec Baldwin discharged a prop firearm during a film shoot in New Mexico.
The pair had been filming the Western Rust on a ranch near Santa Fe, starring Baldwin as an 1880s outlaw. Joel Souza, the film’s director, was also injured during the incident, and taken to Christus St. Vincent’s Regional Medical Center for treatment.
“According to investigators it appears that the scene being filmed involved the use of a prop firearm when it was discharged,” Juan Rios, a spokesman for Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, told the Albuquerque Journal. “Detectives are investigating how and what type of projectile was discharged.” The Sheriff’s Office said that Baldwin was questioned by investigators and released; no have been no charges had been filed and the incident remained under investigation.
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Baldwin responds on Twitter
On Friday morning, Baldwin addressed the incident on Twitter, writing: “There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours. I’m fully cooperating with the police investigation to address how this tragedy occurred and I am in touch with her husband, offering my support to him and his family. My heart is broken for her husband, their son, and all who knew and loved Halyna.”
Tributes pour in for Halyna Hutchins
Hutchins, 42, had been serving as the director of photography of Rust. She was born in Ukraine and said in a 2019 interview with American Cinematographer that she was an “army brat” who grew up on an Arctic military base. While she started her career as a journalist, she pivoted to filmmaking while working on British film productions in Eastern Europe and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in cinematography.
While in L.A., Hutchins met Bob Primes, a cinematographer and two-time Emmy winner who looked over her reel and encouraged her to apply to the American Film Institute Conservatory. She was accepted and entered the program in 2013; Primes was one of her teachers. “She was one of the most innovative students I’ve ever had there,” Primes says. “To be a successful director of photography, you just don’t do everything perfectly. You’ve got to be right on the cutting edge: inventing, innovating, and doing stuff that you don’t know how to do, but you’re willing to have the courage to do anyway. And she had that in spades.”
Recently, Hutchins worked on films including Blindfire, The Mad Hatter and Archenemy, the last of which starred and was produced by Joe Manganiello. “I was so lucky to have had Halyna Hutchins as my DP on Archenemy. She had such an eye and a visual style, she was the kind of cinematographer that you wanted to see succeed because you want to see what she could pull off next. She was a fantastic person,” Manganiello wrote on Instagram on Friday.
In a statement, the movie’s production company, Rust Movie Productions LLC, wrote: “The entire cast and crew has been absolutely devastated by today’s tragedy, and we send our deepest condolences to Halyna’s family and loved ones. We have halted production on the film for an undetermined period of time and are fully cooperating with the Santa Fe Police Department’s investigation.”
Hutchins was the rare woman in a field that is overwhelmingly male. In 2020, just 6% of cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films were women, according to a recent study. Hutchins described herself as an “adrenaline junkie” on her Instagram, which was filled with images of her on film sets across the world. As the news of her death broke, tributes from the film community poured in on Twitter:
“One thing I learned is that cinematography is not something you do by yourself. It’s a group [project],” Hutchins said in the American Cinematographer interview. You need to develop your own vision, but the key to a successful film is communication with your director and your team.”
Prop gun raises questions about set safety
The incident adds to a long history of gun-related on-set accidents. Bill Davis, a prop gun expert, said on the Albuquerque news station KRQE that the guns used on sets are often real firearms loaded with blanks. But blanks can still be dangerous, especially at close range. In 1984, the actor Jon-Erik Hexum accidentally killed himself with a .44 Magnum pistol loaded with blanks on the set of Cover Up when, joking around, he held the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. In 1993, the actor Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee, was killed while filming The Crow by a gun that was supposed to just have blanks, but had a bullet lodged in the barrel.
Typically, the firing of a gun on a film set requires a team of team of people signing off, including propmasters, safety officers, special effects technicians and stunt coordinators. On Friday morning, Indiewire reported that IATSE Local 44, the union that represents prop masters, sent an email to its members saying that the gun used to kill Hutchins contained “a live round,” and that the production’s propmaster was not a member of Local 44. (In a phone call, a representative for Local 44 declined to comment.)
The shooting has only heightened tensions around on-set safety regulations that have been close to the center of a dispute between Hollywood media companies and the union IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). Earlier this month, more than 50,000 IATSE members voted to go on strike, citing poor wages, unsafe working conditions and insufficient rest periods. (A strike was averted when the two parties negotiated a new contract last week.)
“Across the board, this industry is filled with red flags for safety,” the film worker Paul Rodriguez told TIME earlier this month. “If you’re rigging grip or on electric, you could be 70, 80 feet in the air. Every day, there’s something where you could die.”
Three days ago, Hutchins posted a photo on Instagram of the cast and crew of Rust–with Baldwin standing at the front holding a thumbs up sign–with the caption, “Standing in #IAsolidarity with our IATSE crew her in New Mexico on RUST.”
In 2017, stuntwoman Joi Harris was killed on the Vancouver set of Deadpool 2 when she was ejected from her motorcycle, with government investigators later concluding that “the employer failed to complete important health and safety documentation.” Two years later, the special effects coordinator Warren Appleby was killed in an accident while working on the TV series Titans. On Friday, the actor Xander Berkeley predicted that the incident would serve as a turning point for the use of guns on set.
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