The director of the film Rust has been seen for the first time since his release from hospital following the fatal shooting of his cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.
Joel Souza, 48, looked distraught as he sat in a car in Palo Alto, California with a female companion.
Souza, who was shot in the shoulder in Thursday’s tragedy, was released from the Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in Santa Fe on Friday.
On Tuesday he was seen near his San Francisco home, holding his head in his hands in the passenger seat ahead of a press conference scheduled for Wednesday, at which more details of the accident will be revealed.
Joel Souza, 48, was seen on Tuesday near his San Francisco home with his head in his hands. The California-born director of Rust was shot in the shoulder on Thursday in a shooting that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, 42
Souza was in the passenger seat of the car in Palo Alto, with an unnamed woman, on Tuesday
He was seen on Tuesday frequently rubbing his eyes, visibly upset. On Wednesday a press conference will be held to discuss the latest findings from the investigation
Souza was released from hospital on Friday, a day after the shooting on the set of the Western film
The director was seen wearing a face mask on Tuesday, putting it to wear outside the vehicle
Hutchins, 42, died of her injuries when Alec Baldwin, star of the Western film, shot her dead in rehearsals. He had been told that it was a ‘cold gun’ – one which did not have live rounds.
Souza, the director of Rust, is seen in November 2019 at the New York screening of his film Crown Vic
Souza told investigators with Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office that he heard ‘what sounded like a whip and then a loud pop.’
He noticed Hutchins grabbing her midsection as she stumbled backward.
She ‘was assisted to the ground’ by other crew members and Reid Russell, a camera operator, recalled Hutchins saying she could not feel her legs.
Souza on Saturday issued a statement, saying: ‘I am gutted by the loss of my friend and colleague, Halyna.
‘She was kind, vibrant, incredibly talented, fought for every inch and always pushed me to be better. My thoughts are with her family at this most difficult time.
‘I am humbled and grateful by the outpouring of affection we have received from our filmmaking community, the people of Santa Fe, and the hundreds of strangers who have reached out….. It will surely aid in my recovery.’
On Wednesday Mary Carmack-Altwies, the District Attorney for the First Judicial district, will provide further information, alongside Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza.
Significant questions remain as to how live ammunition was allowed onto the set, and how Baldwin was mistakenly given a ‘hot’ gun.
‘We haven’t ruled out anything,’ said Carmack-Altwies, speaking on Tuesday to The New York Times about possible charges.
‘Everything at this point, including criminal charges, is on the table.’
Carmack-Altwies told the paper that the investigation was focusing on ballistics in an effort to determine what kind of round was in the gun that killed Hutchins.
‘There were an enormous amount of bullets on this set, and we need to find out what kinds they were,’ said Carmack-Altwies.
Detectives said that they recovered three revolvers, spent casings and ammunition — in boxes, loose and in a fanny pack.
Carmack-Altwies took issue with descriptions of the firearm used in the incident as ‘prop-gun,’ saying that the terminology, which is used in some of the court documents related to the case, could give the misleading impression that it was not a real gun.
‘It was a legit gun,’ she said.
‘It was an antique-era appropriate gun.’
Sources told TMZ on Saturday that the gun had been used by the crew off-set for target practice – an allegation that, if confirmed, will raise serious questions about the protocols on set.
According to a search warrant filed in a Santa Fe court, the gun given to Baldwin was one of three that the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, had set on a cart outside the wooden structure where a scene was being acted.
A search warrant released Friday said that armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed (left) laid out three prop guns on a cart outside the filming location, and assistant director Dave Halls (right) grabbed the gun from the cart and brought it inside to Baldwin
An aerial view of the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, where the movie was being filmed
Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot with a prop gun fired by actor Alec Baldwin on the movie set in New Mexico on Thursday
Gutierrez removed a shell casing from the gun after the shooting, and she turned the weapon over to police when they arrived, the court records say.
Baldwin, 63, has spoken of his devastation at the accident. He has been seen comforting Hutchins’s husband and son
Gutierrez, 24, appeared on the ‘Voices of the West’ podcast last month where she admitted she was initially reluctant about her abilities.
‘I just finished up working on ‘The Old Way’ with Nicolas Cage, his very first Western,’ she told the podcast.
‘It was also my first time being head armorer as well.
‘You know, I was really nervous about it at first and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready. But doing it, it went really smoothly.’
Her father, Thell Reed, is also a well-known Hollywood armorer.
Yet on Tuesday, The Wrap reported that there were multiple complaints made about her after she discharged weapons without warning and infuriated Cage.
Stu Brumbaugh, who served as key grip on the film said that Gutierrez failed to follow basic gun safety protocols like announcing the arrival and usage of weapons onto the set.
After firing a gun near the cast and crew for a second time in three days without warning, Brumbaugh said that Cage yelled at her: ‘Make an announcement, you just blew my f****** eardrums out!’
Cage then stormed off set.
‘I told the AD, ‘She needs to be let go,’ said Brumbaugh.
‘After the second round I was pissed off. We were moving too fast. She’s a rookie.’
Production of the film has stopped now in light of the tragedy. The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department is investigating and ‘collecting evidence’, a spokesman said on Friday
Baldwin and Hutchins (circled) are pictured together on the set of Rust, in an image that she uploaded to Instagram two days before the fatal shooting
Brumbaugh also claimed that she tucked pistols under her armpits and carried rifles in each hand, and aimed firearms at people.
Gutierrez has not commented, and has deleted her social media profiles.
She was seen on Monday outside her home in Arizona, deep in conversation.
On Tuesday her landlady at the rundown property she lives in in Bullhead City, Arizona, told Fox News that she wanted her out of the house.
‘I remember her because she had blonde hair then,’ a neighbor told Fox.
‘She shared the place with other youngsters. They were coming and going all the time and the place is a wreck. I can’t imagine what it’s like inside.’
Baldwin is seen in costume, covered with fake blood, in an image posted to Instagram
The Bonanza Creek ranch in New Mexico, outside of Santa Fe, is seen during filming of Rust. Baldwin is believed to have shot and killed Hutchins inside this church
Hutchins, born in Ukraine, was fondly remembered by those who worked with her on the set of Rust
Questions were also being asked about the actions of the assistant direction.
Audio of the 911 call, released on Friday, showed the script supervisor, Mamie Mitchell, summoning help and blaming the film’s assistant director.
While the phone operator is inputting the details, Mitchell can be heard telling someone else: ‘OK, this f****** AD that yelled at me at lunch asking about revisions, this motherf*****.
‘Did you see him lean over my desk and yell at me? He’s supposed to check the guns. He’s responsible for what happened.’
A detective, in his warrant application, wrote that assistant director Dave Halls grabbed the gun from the cart and brought it inside to Baldwin, unaware that it was loaded with live rounds.
It is not known whether Mitchell was referring Halls in the audio.
Ray Liotta, star of Goodfellas and Many Saints of Newark, told The Associated Press that he was shocked by the on-set shooting.
‘They always — that I know of — they check it so you can see,’ he said.
‘They give it to the person you’re pointing the gun at.
‘They do it to the producer.
‘They show whoever is there that it doesn’t work.’
Prior to the fatal shooting there were at least two accidental discharges of prop firearms on the set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to The Wall Street Journal.
And Halls, according to people who spoke to Insider, had previously sparked alarm with his directions.
Melissa Low Lyon, the former on-set dresser for Hulu’s horror series Into the Dark, alleged that Halls caused concern in 2019 when he told actor Creed Bratton to perform a stunt where his character was supposed to be shot in the head.
Bratton told Halls that he was worried about the scene, and uneasy about the actions Halls wanted. Bratton feared that the dummy projectile could still hit him in the eye, but Halls pressed him to continue, Lyon claimed.
‘Creed himself expressed concern because he said ‘it’s not going to get my eye is it,” Lyon told Insider.
‘And then as soon as it happened, he said ‘I f****** knew it.”
Lyon said she found Halls ‘volatile’ and difficult to work with.
‘Dave gets very confrontational in a sense, and just doesn’t want to listen and says, ‘well we’re just going to do it’ and he’ll do things like he did on Rust and just grab it or do it himself,’ Lyon said.
Halls was previously fired from the production of another film, Freedom’s Path, in 2019 after an accident involving a gun.
The weapon in that production fired unexpectedly, injuring a sound crew member who recoiled from the blast and had to seek treatment.
Freedom’s Path is still in production and is expected to be released next year.
Rock Soul Studios, the company that produced the movie, fired him as a result.
The company told CNN about the incident on Monday as others in the industry lined up to trash Halls, calling him unprofessional, ‘barbaric’ and negligent.
On the set of another film, horror Western The Pale Door, released in August 2020, a second assistant director quit in protest at how Halls treated him and other workers.
Halls, the first assistant director, was constantly ‘rushing everyone’ and was ‘rude about it, too,’ said Danny Hulsey.
Hulsey told Insider he did not see any safety violations, but was angered by Halls’ attitude.
Halls has not commented on either the 2019 incident, the 2020 confrontation, or the Rust shooting.
Rust had the a low budget for a film, with producers wanting the movie shot at the cost of an average episode of a high-end drama series – about $6-$7 million.
It was also on a tight 21-day filming schedule, according to Deadline.
The budget lead to constraints, according to some.
Neal W. Zoromski, a veteran prop master, said that he turned down an offer to join Rust because they would not give him the team he requested.
Zoromski told The Los Angeles Times he initially asked for a department of five technicians, which would be standard in the business.
He then modified his request to two experienced crew members: an assistant prop master and an armorer, who handles prop guns.
But he said he was told the movie could only afford one person handling all these duties, so he turned down the job.
‘There were massive red flags,’ he said.
‘After I pressed ‘send’ on that last email, I felt, in the pit of my stomach: ‘That is an accident waiting to happen.’
The production company behind the film said that they were unaware of any previous problems.
‘Though we were not made aware of any official complaints concerning weapon or prop safety on set, we will be conducting an internal review of our procedures while production is shut down,’ the company, Rust Movie Productions, said in a statement.
The company has emailed the crew and actors to tell them that production of the film was being halted, but called it ‘a pause rather than an end.’
EXCLUSIVE: Rookie armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, 24, is spotted for first time since Alec Baldwin used gun SHE had loaded to accidentally shoot dead cinematographer on set of Rust
Pacing up and down and talking animatedly on her phone, rookie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was seen for the first time since a gun she loaded killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins while being handled by Alec Baldwin.
Gutierrez-Reed, 24, has fled Santa Fe and was found at her dilapidated Bullhead City, Arizona, home by DailyMail.com where she declined to speak about the fatal accident.
Exclusive DailyMail.com photos show a worried-looking Gutierrez-Reed pacing outside her home and speaking on the phone before dashing back inside and refusing to answer the door.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was seen for the first time as she paced outside her home on Monday, October 25
The rookie armorer was snapped deep into a phone conversation outside her home
Gutierrez-Reed was named on Friday as the person who loaded Baldwin’s vintage Colt pistol which was being used in a gunfight scene set in a church at the Bonanza Ranch in Santa Fe.
A call sheet obtained by DailyMail.com names the 24-year-old as the film’s assistant prop master and armorer, overseen by prop master Sarah Zachry.
She also appeared in a photo posted by Hutchins to her Instagram page showing the whole crew two days before she was killed.
According to a police warrant, the Colt was one of three pistols left on a table by Gutierrez-Reed and was handed to Baldwin by British assistant director Dave Halls who told the veteran actor it was ‘cold’- not realizing it had been loaded with live rounds.
Cops say Baldwin was practicing drawing the weapon when it fired – fatally hitting cinematographer Hutchins, 42, and injuring director Joel Souza, 48.
After the shooting, the armorer took possession of the gun and a spent casing, which were turned over to police, along with other prop guns and ammunition used on the set.
According to a call sheet obtained by DailyMail.com, the crew was rehearsing a mock gunfight inside the church building when Hutchins was hit.
After her phone call, Gutierrez-Reed rushed back into her home and refused to answer the door on Monday
She returned to her run down home in Bullhead City, Arizona as the investigation into the fatal shooting of the Rust cinematographer
Gutierrez-Reed was named on Friday as the person who loaded Baldwin’s vintage Colt pistol which was being used in a gunfight scene set in a church at the Bonanza Ranch in Santa Fe
Rust was only the second movie Gutierrez-Reed has worked on and sources on the set described her as ‘inexperienced and green’
Co-stars Jensen Ackles, Swen Temmers and Travis Hammer were also in the scene – numbered 121 – alongside Baldwin’s stunt double Blake Teixeira and stunt coordinator Allan Graf.
Ackles spoke about his weapons training for the film a week before the tragic on-set shooting accident. The actor, who frequently used a gun playing Dean Winchester for 15 seasons on Supernatural, regaled a crowd of fans with an anecdote about his brief gun training for Rust a week before Baldwin’s tragic gun accident.
‘I’ve got a 6 AM call tomorrow to have a big shootout,’ Ackles was heard saying in a video captured by a fan. ‘They had me pick my gun, they were like, ‘Alright, what gun would you like?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know?’ and the armorer was like, ‘Do you have gun experience?”
‘I was like, “A little.” And she’s like, “Okay, well, this is how you load it, this is how we check it and make sure it’s safe.”‘
The crowd, as well as Jensen’s Supernatural co-star Jared Padalecki, burst out laughing since the actor had so much on-camera experience shooting.
He continued with the story, telling the group that the armorer told him to fire off some blank rounds over in a field.
‘So she’s like, ‘I’ll just put some blanks in there and just fire a couple of rounds towards the hill.’
‘I walk out and she’s like, ‘Just make sure you pull the hammer all the way back and aim at your target’.
Demonstrating how he did it in training, Jensen said he whipped the gun out of his holster and expertly fired the weapon, leading the armorer to jokingly call him ‘an a**hole’ for pretending like he was inexperienced.
Production notes show the Colt pistol was one of several weapons on set at the time but the only one used in 121 and the preceding 118.
Filming had been due to continue with a scene that showed Baldwin being thrown into a stagecoach but it was halted following the accidents.
Further scenes featuring Baldwin and Ackles had been scheduled for the weekend but have now been postponed indefinitely.
Rust was only the second movie Gutierrez-Reed has worked on and sources on the set described her as ‘inexperienced and green’.
According to her LinkedIn page, she most recently worked as a videographer at Synth Fire, a California-based news and media company, and as a documentary filmmaker for the City of Flagstaff in Arizona.
She worked as an armorer for Yellowstone film ranch between March and June 2021, but according to the page stopped working there three months before filming for Rust started in October.
Gutierrez-Reed had only recently left Northern Arizona university, where she studied creative media and film between 2017 and 2020.
The daughter of legendary Hollywood armorer Thell Reed, 78, Gutierrez-Reed previously worked on Nicholas Cage movie The Old Way – admitting beforehand that she ‘wasn’t sure’ if she was ready in a podcast interview.
She said: ‘I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready, but doing it, it went really smoothly.’
She also admitted in the podcast interview she found loading blanks into a gun ‘the scariest’ thing because she did not know how to do it and had sought help from her father.
But while Gutierrez-Reed thought the job had gone smoothly, sources told the Daily Beast that the rookie armorer was ‘unsafe’ and had handed a gun to 11-year-old actress Ryan Kiera Armstrong.
The source said: ‘She was a bit careless with the guns, waving it around every now and again. There were a couple times she was loading the blanks and doing it in a fashion that we thought was unsafe.’
The insider added that they had seen her loading a gun on pebble strewn ground – which has the potential to be dangerous – before handing off the gun to Armstrong.
‘She was reloading the gun on the ground, where there were pebbles and stuff,’ the source said. ‘We didn’t see her check it, we didn’t know if something got in the barrel or not.’
Meanwhile, sources on the Rust set have said the fatal incident was a result of production failings from top to bottom.
Zak Knight, a pyrotechnic and special effects engineer who is a member of Local 44, told DailyMail.com on Friday that Hutchins’ death was caused by a ‘cascade of failures’ by multiple people: ‘There should have never been live rounds on a movie set, that’s number one. Number two is every single person on a movie set has a right to inspect a weapon before it’s fired. And number three is, there is no reason to ever put a person in front of a weapon that’s firing.
They claim she did not check the gun before placing it on the prop table to be used
Several sources from the set have said that Gutierrez-Reed was ‘careless with the guns’ on set
Gutierrez-Reed (left) admitted in a podcast interview she found loading blanks into a gun ‘the scariest’ thing because she did not know how to do it and had sought help from her father, legendary gunsmith Thell Reed, (right) to get over the fear
Sources added that assistant director Halls, who handed the gun to Baldwin and told him it was safe, should have checked the weapon.
‘He’s supposed to be our last line of defense and he failed us,’ one of the sources on set said. ‘He’s the last person that’s supposed to look at that firearm.’
A Rust production source told The Daily Beast that there were at least two previous incidents of guns being accidentally discharged by other crew members on set before Thursday’s tragic incident.
Rust crew members claim there were several complaints made against the armorer on the set and that at least six ‘fed-up’ people had walked off the set prior to Gutierrez-Reed handing Baldwin the gun that killed Hutchins.
The crew made their complaints directly to assistant director Dave Hall – who is named in the search warrant affidavit as the person handed Baldwin the gun that killed Hutchins and told him it was safe – and demanded all the discharges were documented.
‘All of us yelled at him, ‘That better be on the production report, these guys are irresponsible and shouldn’t be here,’ a production source said.
‘That should be automatic grounds for termination on a union film set, you should be gone. The first time that gun went off without telling anybody, that whole department should have been replaced, immediately. Clearly production thought better of it, decided to roll the dice and pay the ultimate price.’
Deadline also cites an unnamed source who said a gun had gone off ‘in a cabin’ while someone was holding it, days prior to the shooting that killed Hutchins.
‘A gun had two misfires in a closed cabin. They just fired loud pops – a person was just holding it in their hands and it went off,’ they said, apparently referring to unintentional discharges.
A Santa Fe County Sheriff Department spokesman said: ‘The investigation remains active and open. Witnesses continue to be interviewed and evidence collected.’
In addition to the criminal probe, New Mexico’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau is investigating Hutchins’ death, and could impose civil penalties even if no charges are brought in the case.
‘Our state OSHA program is investigating this,’ Rebecca Roose, deputy cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department,’ told Deadline.
‘The state takes all workplace safety issues very seriously and will work diligently through our investigation of this tragic fatality.’
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk