# ‘A cascade of terrible things’: documentary pieces together Rust shooting tragedy

Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna pays tribute to the cinematographer killed in a freak on-set accident

Aneil Hutchins on the set of Rust.

* Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust.
* Photograph: Felipe Orozco

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Aanyone who loved Halyna Hutchins expected her to become a name. At 42, Hutchins had worked her way from photojournalism to cinematography, building an impressive portfolio that was beginning to court attention in Hollywood. Her work alone attracted Joel Souza, a writer-director, who hired her in 2021 to be his director of photography for a new western called Rust, to film in Santa Fe that October. “She absolutely would have become a household name as a cinematographer,” said Rachel Mason, one of Hutchins’s close friends and the director of the new  documentary Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna. “Anyone who knew her had absolutely no doubt she was going to be on the highest level, winning awards, becoming well-known for that.”

The , subsequent investigations and eventual trials – Baldwin and the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, were both charged with involuntary manslaughter – made headlines around the world and  for greater safety on film sets. Hutchins’s name always appeared next to a celebrity’s or the word “killed”, if she was mentioned at all. “This unimaginable thing happened and she overnight became very well-known for not the reasons we all expected her to become well-known,” said Mason. “It just felt so wrong and so unfair.”

Mason, who first met Hutchins when their sons attended the same daycare, experienced what many in the film, including numerous co-workers from the Rust set, recall as a nightmare of attention and speculation – what happened, how, who was to blame? “When any type of personal tragedy becomes public, it is a compounded trauma,” she said. As part of working through it, Hutchins’s widower Matthew asked Mason to direct a documentary focusing on Halyna, with the aim to “simply right the wrong of her being known as a person that was a victim of a gunshot at the hands of a celebrity”.

But in order to do so, she had to dig into the details of the tragedy, to pick at the wound. “I realized that I couldn’t make a film about her life if I didn’t understand how she died,” Mason says in voiceover during the film’s opening minutes. Last Take is, in part, about Halyna – her artistry, her vision, her family and her ambition, with access to her personal texts, photos, videos and journals up to and including her last day on set. But it is also just as much an investigation into what exactly happened on the Rust set on 21 October 2021, via crew testimony, expert witnesses and the footage that exists from that day, from the film and from police body cameras.

That split focus may seem counter-intuitive to the film’s explicit goal of celebrating Halyna’s life, and drew some criticism from Souza during a screening last week in Los Angeles: “I hoped it might have a little more Halyna in it or been a little more about Halyna,” Souza , addressing Mason and the producer Julee Metz. But Mason maintained that the developments in the understanding of what happened on set – investigations, trials – contributed to a shift in focus. “As we were working on the film, the story kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” she said. “There was more news, there were trials, and there were things that I couldn’t have imagined when I first started. I just wanted to focus entirely on Halyna and her body of work, the people that she knew and she worked with, and not so much on Rust.”

But getting to know the people who worked with Halyna on what would be her last project – interview subjects include the camera assistant Lane Luper, the costume designer Terese Davis, the assistant director Dave Halls and Souza, among others – “was so impactful, and it told part of Halyna’s own story”, she said. “And it was a part that I had to learn about, because it helped explain exactly what happened.”

All of her friends felt just this horror of unanswered questions. Everything was just ripped out, and we all wanted answers,” she added. “I don’t know if I feel satisfied with all the answers, but I got as much as I could possibly get by going through this process.”

But getting to know the people who worked with Halyna on what would be her last project – interview subjects include the camera assistant Lane Luper, the costume designer Terese Davis, the assistant director Dave Halls and Souza, among others – “was so impactful, and it told part of Halyna’s own story”, she said. “And it was a part that I had to learn about, because it helped explain exactly what happened.”

* Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna is now available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere

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