The director of “Lust” has spoken for the first time in detail about the on-set shooting that took the lives of himself and cinematographer Halina Hutchins.
Both Joel Souza and Hutchins were shot when Alec Baldwin’s prop gun went off during rehearsals on the set of the Western in October 2021. In a new interview, the 51-year-old director revealed that immediately after the shooting he “just didn’t want to be there anymore” and wanted to “bleed to death.”
To this day, he feels “devastated” by the tragedy.
“When I tell people it ruined me, I don’t mean it in the way that people typically think. I don’t mean it ruined my career,” Souza said. Vanity Fair“So internally, who I was has disappeared. It just stopped.”
“The doctors in Santa Fe kept saying to me, ‘Do you know how lucky you are?'” the director recalled after the accident.
“And I thought, ‘How unlucky.’ The lung came off about this far. Luckily it stopped about this far from my spine.”
When asked if he was grateful to be alive while recovering in the hospital, Souza replied, “No, I wasn’t. I remember very clearly going to bed that night and hoping I wouldn’t wake up the next morning.”
“I was hoping he would bleed to death overnight because I didn’t want to be here any longer,” he added.
“It was a very difficult moment. I remember just thinking, ‘I’m probably going to bleed to death and that would suit me perfectly.’
As weeks and months passed, Souza continued to suffer.
“I was never one to have nightmares, but I started having nightmares every night for over a year,” he said.
“They were nightmares that would make me wake up in a cold sweat. Sometimes they were very vague, unfocused dreams, sometimes they were very specific.”
He continued, “I’ve been to therapy many times, but it didn’t work for me. I believe therapy can help others, and I envy the relief it gives people.”
“I wish I had something like that to fall back on, but I didn’t. So I went to six therapists, and then I was kind of wandering in the woods a bit.”
Now, the feeling that “I don’t want to be here anymore” seems to have at least partially subsided.
“You have responsibilities in life and you have people you love and you want to be there for them,” he explained. “There have been a lot of very difficult times over the years and I still have very difficult times.”
Baldwin, who also produced “Lust,” claims he never pulled the trigger on the prop gun, which investigators say contained live ammunition when it was supposed to only contain “blanks.”
The film’s weapons maker, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Baldwin was also charged with manslaughter, but the case was tossed out in July after a judge found that local police had improperly handled evidence.
Souza was initially reluctant to complete the film, but changed his mind after he became “convinced” that Hutchinson “would have wanted it to be his final work.”
But a scene from the film that was being rehearsed when the shooting happened will not make it into the final cut. “That scene is completely gone,” he said.
