Attorneys representing Hannah Gutierrez-Reid, the armorer working on Rust, claimed that the live bullet in the gun that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was the result of “sabotage.”
On the film’s New Mexico set last month, actor Alec Baldwin pulled the trigger on a prop gun that unexpectedly fired a live round (although assistant director David Halls reportedly told him otherwise moments earlier). Hutchins was killed as a result, and director Joel Souza was injured. While Halls handed Baldwin the gun, a search warrant filed in a Santa Fe court states that the weapon was one of three that Gutierrez-Reed left on a cart near the set.
Today, Gutierrez-Reed’s attorneys — Jason Bowles and Robert Gorence — appeared on Good Morning America and the Today show to speak out on behalf of their client. “I believe that somebody who would do that would want to sabotage the set, want to prove a point, want to say that they’re disgruntled, they’re unhappy,” Bowles said on Today. “And we know that people had walked off the set the day before.”
He was referring to a half-dozen members of Rust‘s camera crew, who staged a walkout the morning of the incident to protest working conditions. “We know there was a live round in a box of dummy rounds that shouldn’t have been there,” he continued. “We have a time frame between 11 [a.m.] and 1 [p.m.], approximately, that day, in which the firearms at times were unattended, so there was an opportunity to tamper with this scene.”
On GMA, Bowles denied previous reports that the tragedy occurred during a rehearsal. According to him, it took place during tech prep, while the crew were positioning cameras. Gutierrez-Reed had two jobs on the film — part-time armorer and key props assistant, and allegedly wasn’t present for the shooting.
“Hannah was not in the church and that’s really significant because if there was something to involve one of the firearms, she had to be there,” Bowles said on Today. “She wasn’t in the church because it wasn’t set up to have that dynamic of: We’re going to use one of these firearms.”
Rust is the second feature film that Gutierrez-Reid has ever worked on, and sources told The Daily Beast that at one point during production, she handed an 11-year-old actress a gun without checking properly for safety. While appearing on the podcast Voices of the West last month, she also admitted to expressing self-doubt as a film armorer due to her inexperience (per TMZ).
Bowles pointed out that Gutierrez-Reed’s father, veteran Hollywood armorer Thell Reed, has trained her from the age of 10. “This is not about her being inexperienced,” he said. “It’s about a production set where they didn’t give the resources. She wasn’t a full-time armorer. They didn’t pay her for that… It’s the way they wanted to allocate resources and the emphasis on profitability, frankly, over safety.”