Alec Baldwin described the experience of returning to a movie set as “strange” while recalling the death of Rust director of photography Halyna Hutchins briefly in a four-minute video diary posted to his Instagram.
Back working for the first time in nearly four months, the actor recorded and published the video diary Tuesday. In it, he reflects on his first day of filming the independent film about a hijacked plane that will crash in 97 minutes, which is how long it will take for fuel to run out.
“We had our first day today, which is always … tricky,” he began. “I don’t work as much as I used to. I said this before maybe, but you go to work and you forget what you’re supposed to do. I just was like, ‘What do you do? What is acting or any of this nonsense I ended up doing?’ It’s strange to go back to work.”
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Immediately after, Baldwin references the last time he was on a set — filming Rust on its Bonanza Creek Ranch set in Santa Fe, where he discharged a firearm with live rounds that accidentally struck and killed Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza. The incident has been under investigation by the Santa Fe Sheriff’s department and district attorney, with the most recent development seeing Baldwin hand over his cellphone to investigators a month after a search warrant had been issued for the device.
“I haven’t worked since October 21 of last year when this horrible thing happened on the set of this film and the accidental death of our cinematographer Halyna Hutchins,” he said, solemnly. “I still find that hard to say. But I went back to work today for the first time in three and a half months.”
The former 30 Rock star went on to say that the experience of working on movies is “nearly always the same,” pointing specifically to how frequently he works on projects where “everbody’s young compared to me.” That’s especially true, he said, on independent films, which both 97 Minutes and Rust are.
“Everyone’s young, especially in independent film, where there are good people, there are very good people, but everybody’s chasing all the good people and a lot of the best ones get gobbled up by projects that have more money,” Baldwin said. “When you have a very limited budget, you’re filling positions with people who are good, but they’re probably early in their career and … young.”
He went on to say that while everyone is young, “the crew of movies are very hardworking,” before pointing to the filming conditions he and his current film crew were working under.
“They’re very hardworking, on their feet all day — in an unheated building, I might add,” he said. “The building had no heat. It was tricky to try to get everything done. Many, many independent films now can be very tricky in terms of giving the amount of work you have from the time you have are definitely not in sync.”
While Baldwin didn’t directly reference anyone while speaking about young crewmembers and, as he sees it, their tendency to work on independent films, the comment could be related to Rust, whose armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed had only had a few projects under her belt when she joined the production. She, like Baldwin, is currently under investigation by the sheriff’s department and district attorney for the shooting death of Hutchins.
In January, Gutierrez-Reed sued Seth Kenney, the man whose company supplied ammunition to the Rust production, in a claim that he introduced live rounds on set.
