Rust director Joel Souza sarcastically explained why he didn’t watch Alec Baldwin’s new reality show, The Baldwins.
“I think I was busy hitting myself in the face with a frying pan that night,” Souza, 51, quipped to The Guardian in an interview published on Monday, April 28.
Souza first indicated that he’d distanced himself with the Rust star in an August 2024 Vanity Fair profile, where he was asked about the current state of his relationship with Baldwin.
“Getting through it was tough. We got through it,” the filmmaker said. “I got the performance I wanted. We’re not friends. We’re not enemies. There’s no relationship.”
Production was suspended on the Western movie in October 2021 when Baldwin allegedly fired a prop gun that killed director of photography Halyna Hutchins and injured Souza.
An exhaustive criminal investigation followed in Sante Fe, New Mexico, which led to Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s March 2024 conviction for involuntary manslaughter. Gutierrez-Reed was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Related: Alec Baldwin’s Rust Movie Trailer Released 3 Years After Fatal Shooting
The first footage of Alec Baldwin’s movie Rust debuted over three years after the on-set death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. “Somethings in this life you can’t get back, I reckon,” Baldwin’s character, Harland Rust, tells Patrick Scott McDermott’s Lucas in the movie’s debut trailer, released on Wednesday, March 25. The film follows Lucas, an orphan […]
Baldwin was also charged with involuntary manslaughter in January 2023, but the case was later dismissed when First Judicial District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer agreed with his lawyers that prosecutors hid crucial evidence.
Judge Marlowe’s dismissal was filed without prejudice, meaning prosecutors cannot attempt to refile involuntary manslaughter charges against Baldwin. The actor filed a lawsuit against Santa Fe prosecutors for malicious prosecution and civil rights violations in January 2025.
Souza regrouped with Baldwin and other crew members to resume filming Rust in April 2023, with Halyna’s husband, Matthew Hutchins, coming onboard as an executive producer. The finished film was dedicated to Halyna’s memory.
Looking back on the Rust on-set shooting, Souza admitted that he wished he “never wrote the damn movie.” The filmmaker added that he took no solace in Gutierrez-Reed’s conviction.
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It’s been three years since Halyna Hutchins died on the set of the film Rust, and star Alec Baldwin still hasn’t seen the completed project. “No, I haven’t seen the final cut. I was sent a rough cut early on, before everything got a little more sticky and difficult. So I haven’t seen the film,” […]
“I think we might have had a couple of conversations, first time around,” he said of the armorer. “She seemed nice enough. I just feel terrible for everybody. There can be no joy taken in someone going to jail.”
The former 30 Rock actor always maintained his innocence and insisted that he never pulled the trigger on the prop gun that killed Hutchins.
“The trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them. Never,” he told George Stephanopoulos in a 2021 ABC News special. “I have no idea [how a bullet got in there]. Someone put a live bullet in a gun. A bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property.”
His TLC reality show The Baldwins featured several scenes of Alec and wife Hilaria Baldwin discussing the emotional toll of the shooting.
Related: ‘Rust’ Director Says He Has ‘No Relationship’ With Alec Baldwin
Director Joel Souza is speaking out in his first interview after the fatal shooting on the set of Rust. “I remember specifically going to sleep that night and hoping I didn’t wake up the next morning,” Souza, 51, told Vanity Fair in an interview published on Thursday, August 15. “I hoped I would just bleed […]
“I can’t even believe we’re going through this,” he told his wife in one scene. “I always feel more in pain about you than me. I’ll try my best to get through it, but when I think of what it’s done to you and how much it hurt you and everything … This past year has been just terrible. There was times I’d lay in bed and I’d go, ‘Wow, I can’t get up.’ That’s not like me. I’m not like that at all.”
Hilaria confessed in an on-camera interview for The Baldwins that Alec’s entire family had noticed his “mental health decline” since the on-set shooting.
“He was diagnosed with PTSD, and he says in his darkest moments, ‘If an accident had to have happened this day, why am I still here? Why couldn’t it have been me?” she recalled.
Rust will be released Friday, May 2.
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