Doctors kept telling Joel Souza how lucky he was to be alive, but he didn’t see it that way. The writer-director of the Western drama Rust had been gravely wounded in the accidental on-set shooting that claimed the life of his friend and collaborator, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Even though Souza survived, a part of him felt like he actually didn’t.
“When I tell someone it ruined me, I don’t mean in the sense that people might generally think,” Souza tells Vanity Fair in his first-ever interview about the incident. “I don’t mean that it put my career in ruins. I mean, internally, the person I was just went away. That stopped.”
The 51-year-old adds, “It’s not like I was in love with the guy I was before, anyway. You look in the mirror the day after that happens, and now there’s somebody else there. I didn’t know things about the world one day, and now I do. And none of them are good.”
