The atmosphere should not be festive: Rustwestern with Alec Baldwin whose filming was mourned by the death of its director of photography, the Ukrainian Halyna Hutchins, will have its world premiere on Wednesday November 20, 2024 during a film festival in Poland.
During the filming of the film in New Mexico, in October 2021, American actor Alec Baldwin brandished a weapon supposed to contain only blank bullets but the projectile was very real. The shot fatally struck Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza.
Alec Baldwin himself “will not come” to the festival, the organizers told AFP, without giving the reason for his absence.
Anger of the victim’s family
For their part, those close to Halyna, her mother, her father and her sister, decided to boycott the premiere of the film by accusing the actor of never having apologized to them and of “refusing to take responsibility responsibility for the death” of the young woman.
“Instead, he (Alec Baldwin) seeks to unfairly profit from the murder of my daughter. This is the reason why I refuse to attend the festival for the promotion of Rust », Wrote Olga Soloveï, the operator’s mother, in a statement sent to AFP.
Director Joel Souza will present the film at the Camerimage film festival, dedicated to images in cinema and cinematographers, in Torun, northern Poland.
“A dream of Halyna…”
“Nearly three years after the tragic death of Halyna Hutchins, the Camerimage festival intends to honor her memory and remind the world of her legacy,” declared the organizers before the premiere.
They added that it was about realizing “a dream of Halyna, who, from the early stages of the production of Rustconvinced Souza that their work should be presented” at this festival.
Reality meets fiction
The western, which tells the story of an accidental murder, brings to mind this art which is sometimes confused with life… But the concept of Rust was born from research that Joel Souza had carried out on the youngest person hanged in the American West.
Messrs. Souza and Baldwin then developed the original idea into a screenplay telling the story of an outlaw who rides a horse to save his 13-year-old grandson, convicted of an accident considered murder. .
Serial trials
Following this tragedy, the production’s gunsmith, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was sentenced, in April 2024, to 18 months in prison for accidentally loading the actor’s pistol with a real bullet.
Alec Baldwin’s trial for manslaughter on the set of his western Rust was, for its part, canceled for procedural defects (bullets linked to the case in the possession of the investigators had not been transmitted to the defense).
Filming on the film resumed last year in Montana.
Death of a “rising star”
Originally from Ukraine, Halyna Hutchins grew up on a Soviet military base in the Arctic Circle, “surrounded by reindeer and nuclear submarines,” according to her website.
After studying and working as a journalist in Ukraine and across Europe, she joined the prestigious American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles in 2015. She quickly rose through the ranks of Hollywood cinematographers. She was nominated by the magazine American Cinematographer as one of the industry’s rising stars in 2019.
Revised procedures
While the tragedy sparked calls for a total ban on firearms on film sets, Hollywood preferred to opt for less radical measures. Thus, the industry guidelines on the use of firearms have been revised to 2023-2024, for the first time in twenty years.
Among other changes, they now specify that only a gunsmith can issue a weapon to an actor. In the case of Rustprosecutors said Alec Baldwin was given the gun by the film’s first assistant director, who later pleaded guilty to negligent use of a deadly weapon.
