Last Take Rust and The Story of Halyna: Cult of Celebrity Complicates Tragic Film-Set Shooting
By Liz Braun
Rating: B+
The movie Rust was released into theatres earlier this year to mostly middling reviews, but few critics failed to mention the western’s stunning cinematography.
The woman responsible for all that visual beauty, DP Halyna Hutchins, was shot dead in 2021 on the set of Rust; a prop gun containing live ammunition went off by accident. Writer-director Joel Souza was also injured in the incident.
As actor Alec Baldwin was holding the gun when it fired, the incident was transformed from a senseless, tragic, and entirely preventable workplace death into celebrity fodder for People et al. The tsunami of speculation and accusation around Baldwin obliterated Hutchins and left a thousand questions unanswered about what actually happened on the day she died.
A new documentary from filmmaker Rachel Mason — a friend of Hutchins — attempts to set the record straight. (Watch the film’s trailer).
Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna is a heartbreaking and infuriating account of the carelessness and stupidity leading up to Hutchins’ death. The movie features an array of arresting footage — from the set, from police interrogation rooms and first responder bodycams, from bystander phone video — and interviews with many of the cast and crew involved, including Frances Fisher and Josh Hopkins.
The film also attempts to make Hutchins more than just the victim of a shooting, filling in details about her life, her family, and her ambitions. Hutchins was a gifted cinematographer, and Rust could have been her big break. But she was also someone’s daughter, wife, and mother.
A particularly heartrending segment has Hutchins’ mother, interviewed in Ukraine, explaining why she wants to see the movie Rust get finished — so that Hutchins’ little son can be proud of his mother. This viewer would have been perfectly happy to see more in the film about Hutchins and who she was on her own time… but never mind.
Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna is informative (albeit distressing) but doesn’t offer any final answers about the accident that cost Hutchins her life. It offers guidance, though. Prior to Hutchins’ shooting death, there were worrying incidents on the set of Rust, including a few “negligent discharges” — guns going off when they shouldn’t have.
The day before Hutchins died, the camera crew walked off the set to protest what they described as safety issues on a shoot short on time and money. There were, among other problems, concerns with the way guns were handled.
In the end, three people were criminally charged: actor Baldwin, the armorer or gun handler Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, and the assistant director and safety coordinator Dave Halls. Gutierrez-Reed served about 12 months of an 18-month sentence and was released from prison on May 23.
There’s a fair amount of time in the film devoted to how live bullets came to be on the Rust set. The movie follows the prosecutor’s attempts to make this a broader story about indie films and cutting corners in the industry. Despite efforts to blame the producers and others, the simple fact is that the armorer was inept, and she brought live bullets onto the set with her.
Any “bigger picture” standpoint on Rust will have to include the U.S. gun culture in general, at which point questions about live ammunition anywhere, any time, just seem disingenuous.
Hutchins' death was terrible. The media feeding frenzy and the heartless social media response that followed the tragedy were terrible. People are terrible. Let’s hope Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna will help affect change. It probably won’t.
Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna. Directed by Rachel Mason. With Halyna Hutchins, Joel Souza, Frances Fisher, Dave Halls, Josh Hopkins, and Lane Luper. Streaming now on Disney+.