The director of “Rust” has spoken out for the first time in depth about the on-set shooting that nearly killed him and took the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins . Joel Souza and Hutchins were both shot when Alec Baldwin ’s prop gun went off during a rehearsal on the set of the Western film in October 2021. In a new interview, the director, 51, revealed that in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, he wished he would “bleed out” because he “didn’t want to be around anymore.
” To this day, the tragedy has left him feeling “ruined.” “When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think. I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins,” Souza told Vanity Fair .
“I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.” “The doctor kept telling me in Santa Fe, ‘You know how lucky you are?’” the director recalled after the accident.
“And I’m like, ‘I don’t feel very f–king lucky.’ It missed my lung by this much. It stopped about that far away from my spine, fortunately.
” When asked if he was grateful to be alive while he recovered in the hospital , Souza replied, “No, I wasn’t. I remember specifically going to sleep that night and hoping I didn’t wake up the next morning.” “I hoped I would just bleed out overnight because I didn’t want to be around anymore,” he added.
“It was a very difficult moment. I remember just thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll just sort of ble.