The daughter of legendary director Martin Scorsese — and a longtime industry insider in her own right — Cathy Scorsese has spoken up about her take on Alec Baldwin’s fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust.”
The 55-year-old set prop professional discussed why the film shoot was ripe for tragedy, her past experiences working with Baldwin, 63, and why the incident shows a clear need for change.
“The suits upstairs just don’t get it. If you ask me, once Hollywood got taken over by the executives, it went straight down the toilet,” she told Insider of the filmmaking industry that has become undermined by budgets to a dangerous degree. While she did not work on the film, she blamed long shifts, extreme pressure and cost-cutting measures for making situations like the one on the “Rust” set not uncommon.
“Amid the talk of hiring a nonunion crew and then pushing them beyond their limits and cutting corners to try and save money, it seems they screwed up pretty badly,” she said of “Rust.”
While her personal experience with Baldwin has been positive, as a producer of the movie, she believes he could be even more significantly to blame.
“I worked with Alec Baldwin on the set of ‘The Departed’ and ‘The Aviator.’ Alec is a good human being, and it’s written all over his face how distraught he is. It’s awful, but in addition to his role as an actor, he’s also wearing the producer hat in this case,” she said.
“The number of violations that took place to result in a death and an injury like this is beyond our comprehension,” she added, speaking on behalf of other industry colleagues who’ve been “blowing up” online message boards discussing “how this could have possibly happened when the chain of custody on set for firearms is so specific and strict.”
She hopes the incident will perhaps elicit some change.
“For years, I’ve been saying there’s got to be a better way to make movies, and everybody’s attitude is, ‘Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ But it is broke. It’s very broken, as a matter of fact,” Scorsese said.
