We’re no longer friends, says film director shot by Alec Baldwin

The film director shot by Alec Baldwin has said the actor is no longer a friend, revealing in his first interview since the incident on the set of Rust, that he has nightly nightmares about the shooting that has “ruined him”.
Joel Souza was wounded by the same bullet that killed the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set for the western film in 2021.
Souza has never before spoken publicly about the shooting, but did co-operate with criminal investigators and testified at the April trial of the Rust armourer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter.
Souza returned to finish filming Rust last year, saying he thought it was what Hutchins, 42, would have wanted.
Asked by Vanity Fair about how he found working with Baldwin again, Souza said, “getting through it was tough. We got through it. I got the performance I wanted. We’re not friends. We’re not enemies. There’s no relationship.”
“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think,” Souza, 51, who is married with two children, told the magazine. “I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins. I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.”
Baldwin was practising a cross-draw in a church on the set of the western when the gun fired a live round, striking Hutchins and Souza, who was standing behind her. Souza suffered injuries to his shoulder, which required surgery.
A criminal case against Baldwin was dismissed last month on a technicality.
Souza recalled the moment the bullet fragment struck his body, saying it felt like he had been hit by a bat or kicked by a horse.
When he woke up in hospital the next morning, he remembers feeling an immense survivor’s guilt over Hutchins’s death.
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“I hoped I would just bleed out overnight because I didn’t want to be around any more. It was a very difficult moment. I remember just thinking, ‘maybe I’ll just sort of bleed to death, that would suit me just fine’,” he said.
“I am not a person who had nightmares, and then I started having nightmares nightly, for over a year. They were just wake-me-up-in-a-cold-sweat kind of nightmares.”
He added that he went through a “lot of therapy, but it never worked for me”.
Asked whether Baldwin, 66, a producer on the film, had been reckless in his handling of the prop, Souza said: “I don’t know. It’s a cop-out to say it’s not up to me, but it’s not.
“There is an argument that says, if he checks it and starts fiddling around with it, he’s creating a safety issue. And then there is another thing that says, it’s common sense, Jesus Christ. Be careful with this goddamn thing. The charges got filed. That’s what they decided to do. Was he overcharged? I don’t know.”
He said he did not like to dwell too much on blame, as it “can be toxic to your soul — not that people don’t deserve blame”.