It’s been nearly four years since actor Alec Baldwin shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust, thanks to a prop gun that was accidentally loaded with live rounds. Now, anyone with a Hulu account will be able to watch those fatal, final moments before Hutchins lost her life, in the new documentary, Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna, which will begin streaming on Hulu tomorrow, March 11.
The documentary’s director, Rachel Mason, who was a friend and colleague of Hutchins, states in a voiceover near the start of the film that Hutchins’s husband, Matthew Hutchins, asked Mason to make a film “about Halyna’s life.” But, Mason said, she realized that she needed to first understand Hutchins’s death. And so the movie plays as a true crime-esque investigation into the shooting, intended to satisfy the morbid curiosity that comes with a freak, tragic accident such as this.
That includes the shocking, actual footage of the moment during rehearsal when a gun held by Baldwin went off, injuring Rust director Joel Souza and ultimately killing Hutchins. Because several camera operators had walked out that day, in part over safety concerns on set, Hutchins and Sousa were standing right next to the camera, rather than behind the monitors. Hutchins was giving Baldwin instructions on how to angle his gun toward the camera. Souza was peering over Hutchins’s shoulder. That’s when the gun went off. (Baldwin maintains to this day that he did not fire the gun, but the footage seems to suggest otherwise.)
Though the footage is cropped so you can’t see either Souza or Hutchins in the shot, you do see Baldwin quickly whip the gun out of his jacket, aimed just to the left of the camera, where Hutchins was standing.
Then the footage cuts to black, while the sound of a gunshot rings out.
In a recent interview with Decider over Zoom, director Rachel Mason said she “didn’t necessarily want to include” that footage, but that “it started to happen in edit. Things do come out of edit and you suddenly realize, ‘Oh, we need that.'”
“All I wanted to do was focus on the good stuff—Halyna’s art,” Mason told Decider. “But what you end up having to do are two different things. Sometimes the film tells you have to do this, sometimes executives tell you you have to.”
When asked to clarify if it had been her decision alone, if she would have opted not to include the footage of the shooting, Mason replied, “I wouldn’t put it quite like that, because it is what comes out of edit.”
But, she added, she did have firm input when it came to “the sound effect on the gun shot. I really wanted to make sure that was subtle. If we had to have it, we would have to do it like this.”
In the documentary, director Joel Souza recalls the moment he was shot. “I kinda remember feeling like someone hit me in the shoulder with a bat. I couldn’t move anything,” Souza says in the film. “I was laying this way, and she was laying that way. I remember just locking eyes with her for a minute.”
The documentary also includes body camera footage from the police and EMTs who arrived on the scene, capturing the chaotic aftermath and the shell-shocked cast and crew. Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter, is visibly distraught, and can be seen hyperventilating, crying, and apologizing. Later, the film shows interrogation footage of both Gutierrez-Reed and Baldwin being questioned by police.
Hutchins was airlifted from the set to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, where she was pronounced dead. She was 42 years old.
Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna will begin streaming on Hulu on Tuesday, March 11.