Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins killed by prop gun, just as her career was taking off
- Actor Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun on a movie set, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins
- Santa Fe Sheriff’s Department investigates shooting, which also wounded director Joel Souza
A 2015 graduate of the AFI conservatory, Hutchins, 42, had been selected as one of American Cinematographer’s Rising Stars of 2019. With indie features like Archenemy, Blindfire and The Mad Hatter to her credit, along with a string of shorts and commercial work, she was beginning to make a bigger name for herself.
The period Western Rust, about a 13-year-old boy in 1880s Kansas who goes on the run with his long-estranged grandfather (played by Baldwin) after being sentenced to death for the accidental killing of a local rancher, looked as though it would push her career to a new level.
“I think she was going to be a very famous, very successful DP,” director Adam Egypt Mortimer, who worked with Hutchins on last year’s indie superhero action film Archenemy, told The Los Angeles Times on Thursday evening. “After we made Archenemy, people were calling me saying: ‘She did good work. We’re thinking about putting her up for something’. She was building a reputation. She was showing people what she could do.”
Fellow cinematographer Elle Schneider, a friend of Hutchins’, wrote on Twitter in the wake of her death: “Women cinematographers have historically been kept from genre film, and it seems especially cruel that one of the rising stars who was able to break through had her life cut short on the kind of project we’ve been fighting for”.
