By the edge of a steep, snow-dusted gully just north of
Yellowstone National Park, Alec Baldwin and the crew of the Western “Rust”
gathered for their morning safety meeting as filming resumed a year and a half
after it had been halted by tragedy.
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It was anything but routine.
“I’ve said it, and I’m going to say it every single time:
There are no weapons on set,” Gerard DiNardi, the film’s new first assistant
director, reassured the crew Friday. “There is nothing that fires. There are a
lot of facsimiles of weapons, from rubber to replicas.”
The movie’s new armorer, Andrew Wert, who handles all
weapons and ammunition on set, added that even the dummy rounds — the inert
cartridges that are used in movies to resemble real ammunition — were made of
rubber and wood, and painted gold.
And with those reassurances, filming resumed. It was 18
months ago, on location in New Mexico, that the crew had been setting up a
close-up of Baldwin drawing an old-fashioned revolver when the gun suddenly
went off, firing a real bullet that killed the film’s cinematographer, Halyna
Hutchins, 42; injured its director, Joel Souza; traumatized its cast and crew;
and led to lawsuits and criminal charges.
Roughly 200 cast and crew members are now working to finish
“Rust”.
Not everyone was back: The film’s original armorer, Hannah
Gutierrez-Reed, is facing involuntary manslaughter charges in connection with
Hutchins’ death, and its original first assistant director, Dave Halls, pleaded
no contest to a charge of negligent handling of a weapon. Cinematographer
Bianca Cline has stepped in to finish the film that Hutchins began. Many are
describing “Rust” as a tribute to Hutchins; her husband is now an executive
producer on the film, and he has given his support to two filmmakers to make a
documentary about her life and the completion of the movie.
But Souza, who was wounded in the shooting when the bullet
passed through Hutchins and struck his shoulder, was back in the director’s
chair.
And Baldwin was stepping back into the title role Friday when
New Mexico prosecutors dismissed the involuntary manslaughter charges against
him, after new evidence surfaced suggesting that the gun he had been using,
which was not supposed to contain live ammunition, had been modified. But an
air of uncertainty lingered over the leading man: Prosecutors said that they
would continue to investigate the case, and that they reserved the right to
refile charges against him.
As the crew gathered to resume work, Souza, who first worked
with Baldwin on a draft of the script about five years ago, gave an emotional
address.
“There have been days leading up to today when I honestly
didn’t know how I was going to get out of bed in the morning,” he said, “and
the reason I could was all of you.”
He said that they owed it to Hutchins to approach their work
with joy, as she had.
“I know she’d be anxious for us to get to work, so why don’t
we do that?” Souza said as the meeting wrapped up. “We get to make a movie
today. We might as well make it a good one.”
All eyes on ‘Rust’
Not long after Baldwin was back in costume as Harland Rust,
a grizzled outlaw who wears a cowboy hat, a long brown duster and high leather
boots, he found himself in a scene that centered on a gun.
“Who in the hell are you, mister?” Patrick Scott McDermott,
a young actor, cries, before snatching Rust’s own rifle and pointing it at him.
Each time the armorer, Wert, brings a weapon on set he
declares that the guns being used are replicas, incapable of firing a shot.
Wert, a former US Army infantryman, built the rifles from
individual parts so that they would look as real as possible but would not be
able to fire under any circumstances. He drilled out the parts where the firing
pins would go and modified the cylinders so that no ammunition could fit in
them, and the rubber and wooden bullets were painted gold so that they would
look real when tucked in Baldwin’s bandoleer.
“I didn’t want any question about where the guns came from,
where anything comes from,” said Wert, whose career working with guns on film
sets spans more than 20 years and includes “Dallas Buyers Club” and a 2016
Western starring Woody Harrelson called “The Duel.”
The question of armorers and gun safety on sets has been at
the center of the investigation into how “Rust” turned deadly. Prosecutors have
faulted the original armorer, Gutierrez-Reed, for allowing live ammunition on a
film set, where it is supposed to be banned, and for failing to thoroughly
check the revolver that was handed to Baldwin the day of the shooting.
Questions were raised about how she and Halls, the original first assistant
director, handled gun protocols. Gutierrez-Reed, whose lawyer has said she
intends to plead not guilty, told investigators that she had checked each
round, but acknowledged that she wished she had done so more thoroughly.
On the Montana set, Wert collected the rifles from the
actors between takes and held them to the side; afterward, he stored them in a
case locked with a passcode.
Navigating new terrain
The snow-capped mountains surrounding Yellowstone Film Ranch
in Montana looked different from the drier terrain of the Bonanza Creek Ranch
outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the movie filmed for 11 1/2 days in October
2021 before the shooting brought it to a halt.
Because the script calls for Baldwin’s character to travel
across the West on horseback with his grandson, the filmmakers believe that the
changes in topography can easily be accommodated.
The movie’s costume designer, Terese Davis, has been working
to make sure the new costumes blend in with the ones filmed on actors in New
Mexico.
The outfit that Baldwin wore the day of the shooting had to
be replaced because the original was taken into evidence by law enforcement.
Many other costumes were destroyed in a warehouse fire in New Mexico a couple
of months after the shooting.
So Davis has zoomed in on photos of the old costumes so she
can build new ones with precisely matching colors and fabrics. Her team is
laboriously painting a plaid pattern from one of the old shirts on a new one.
“My big goal has been that my work and any issues with it
not distract from Halyna’s work,” she said.
Davis is among about 10 crew members who have returned to
the movie. There was labor unrest on the original production, and lawsuits were
later filed by some crew members who said that they had not received regular
safety bulletins and cited two previous accidental firearms discharges of
blanks. Rust Movie Productions, which is behind the film, has defended its
safety record, saying that the crew responded to the accidental discharges
properly. But the company agreed to pay a $100,000 settlement to New Mexico
workplace safety regulators.
On the Montana site, safety is front of mind.
Two safety supervisors arrived on the Montana ranch about a
month before filming began to perform risk assessments of areas including
horse-handling and navigating rocky terrain. (“Do not text and walk!” is a
common refrain.) Representatives from entertainment unions are there to observe
higher-risk scenes. And the filming schedule, initially set for 22 days, is now
24, in order to prevent the crew from feeling like they are in a hurry, Smith said.
The budget for the new production, which received new financing to begin
filming again, is about $8 million, while the original was about $6.5 million,
said a lawyer for the production, Melina Spadone.
“Of course we’re bringing an extra level of care,” Smith
said, “because naturally we want everyone extremely comfortable, and because
the production community and the world is watching.”
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