Halyna Hutchins Doc Director on Giving the ‘Rust’ DP Agency in Death: ‘She Was an Artist, Not a Victim’

For the past four years, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins has been known to the public for the tragic end to her life. Director of the new Hulu documentary, “Last Take: ‘Rust and the Story of Halyna,” Rachel Mason wants to remind the world that she was an artist.

“What I hated to see was that she was seen as this sort of tragic victim because that’s the exact opposite of who she was,” Mason told TheWrap. “She was a very forthright person. She was motivated. She was absolutely not the kind of person that you would think of as a victim.”

The documentarian and performance artist sought to show a lesser-known side of the DP whom she befriended a decade ago in, “Last Take: ‘Rust’ and the Story of Halyna,” which is now streaming on Hulu.

The documentary recounts the accident on the set of the independent Western that took the life of the Ukrainian DP — as well as the ensuing investigation and trial — through interviews with “Rust” actors and crew as well as director Joel Souza and Hutchins’ family. Mason also got access to the resumed production of “Rust” in Montana in 2023, and spoke with the film’s team about how they chose to complete the movie to honor Hutchins’ work.

You can watch the trailer for “Last Take: ‘Rust’ and the Story of Halyna” in the video below:

In interviews about “Last Take,” Mason has spoken about how the making of the film was a balancing act between trying to meet the commercial demands of the film — public interest in hearing from the “Rust” team about the high-profile incident and trial — and fulfilling her personal desire to show who Hutchins was as a creative person and to show how she used her work as a cinematographer to leave her personal mark on “Rust.”

“More than giving her authorship, I wanted her to have agency in death,” she said. “No one deserves to be overshadowed by the circumstances of their death and not understood as a person. Looking at what Halyna was doing in this moment of her death, it was so intrinsic to everything about who she was as a person.”

Hutchins spoke with TheWrap about her six-year friendship with Hutchins and the artistic collaborations that spawned from it, along with what she learned about the DP from speaking with the “Rust” crew for the documentary. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In past interviews you have mentioned that you first met Halyna Hutchins back in 2015 and bonded with her over being an artist and a mother. How did your relationship as artistic collaborators grow from that?
I had just moved back to L.A. and I was myself kind of transitioning from being an artist in the visual arts world and entering into filmmaking myself.  I was learning on some level from her what she was doing to start her career as a cinematographer. I can’t exactly remember where she was in her journey, but she was really stepping into being a proper cinematographer when I met her.

She was so excited about working. She was in a place of just wanting to do as much as she possibly could, and to test ideas out and work with different directors.  She was really so vibrant and so excited about the possibilities that were out there for her. I would say at the very early moments when we met, we were very creative together. I had written a script that she was really obsessed with. It was a very kind of dreamy musical script about stars that was very out there but she was completely obsessed with it, and in some ways we had this sort of hypothetical dream project where we were always thinking about this one particular fantasy project.

But over the years we actually did various things that felt like proofs of concept that were manageable in scale that were geared towards a potential of making this giant kind of experimental rock opera together. We started collaborating on different elements of this idea and so I actually have short films … something that was screened at the REDCAT with a live performance.

What was the project called?
It’s called “The Singularity Song.” I actually interviewed some Nobel astrophysicists like Kip Thorne, who you could say is the originator of the idea of wormholes at Caltech. I used his voice and wove it together with this visual imagery of a dancer named Oguri, and Halyna shot it so beautifully. It was this idea about black holes, and on the flip side, we also did another video that was only ever shown in an art gallery and it was about supernovas.

What is striking is that both films have to do with the death of a star, and a star can have two variations. It can either collapse into a black hole or become a supernova and explode out wide. It makes me think about the unknown and the unbelievable, unfathomable dimension of Halyna’s death that I could have never imagined in a million years. It makes you question life itself.

Beyond what you worked on together, was there any project you did that she really responded to?
She was so supportive of my documentary which had come out in 2019, “Circus of Books,” and she came to the premiere at Outfest and wanted to support just everything I was doing with the documentary and as an artist. At that time I was still doing shows and on her Instagram I saw a picture of me performing at a little house party. I mean she would come to every little show I did no matter if it was a club or at a house party or something.

I say that only because it didn’t really matter if it was film or music or in an art gallery. Halyna would show up and I will say she not only did that for me, but she did that for all her friends. She was absolutely so supportive and in an industry that’s pretty competitive, she was not that. She was genuinely motivated to encourage all of her friends.

There is a moment in “Last Take” where Bianca Cline, the cinematographer who was hired to complete “Rust,” is offered to look at Halyna’s production notebook. Was there anything about Halyna as a filmmaker that you learned from making this documentary that maybe surprised you?
Admittedly, it feels very wrong on some level, very voyeuristic to have access to anyone’s private world. But she died and I had suddenly access to her journals and her emails and her text messages. I would not say there was anything that surprised me but it all just deepened my admiration. Halyna was constantly working on the logistics of everything that I guess on some level I did not appreciate until I saw her notebooks.

Her volume of communication with how many logistical elements there are in the work of being a really good DP was amazing. There was a lens dealer way out in the Valley that I went to visit because she wanted a certain type of Lomo lenses and this guy had those lenses. It turns out that they were originally in [Andrei] Tarkovsky’s collection and Halyna made it a point to specifically get these lenses.  In her journals there were so many different handwritten notes about technical elements and specific lenses and then also the rates of different people that she could or could not afford for a different project or not.

She was just so embedded in what it means to be an independent artist on some level, but also as a cinematographer working in indie films where you are helping the director out. You are figuring out all different sides of the logistics as much as you are also doing the creative work. And I could just see that in her notebooks that she was taking notes of different people that she met and being really clear on different recommendations from a focus puller, of somebody that had a Russian camera arm, all these different specific technical things, and she was keeping note of all of it.

You open the film with several interviews from actors and crew members on “Rust” talking about why they went into filmmaking. Was that always the plan for the film?
When I realized that this film was going to focus on “Rust,” I needed to understand how “Rust” was Halyna’s film. People just hear the title and they think, “My God, this project with all this scandal involved” and they think of Alec Baldwin immediately and they really are not thinking about Halyna.

But early on I met Terese, the costume designer, and there’s things that are not in the film, but she walked right up to this dress and said, “Let me show you the dress that Halyna walked right up to and said, ‘This color is the most amazing color. I love this color.'” I talked to the horse wrangler and he said, “Halyna went on an amazing ride just before she died and told me she had never ridden horses and that we were going to ride horses together. She loved it and she was excited about all of the horse imagery in the film.” And you start looking at the horse imagery with a whole different vision. You start looking at the dress in the film with a different vision.

As I learned about Halyna’s obsession with these different elements in the film, I started to watch the footage of “Rust,” understanding this was her movie. And for a long time, I even thought that a cool title for this film could be “Halyna’s Rust” like “Jodorowsky’s Dune.” And as soon as her agent Craig Mizrahi said that she saw a western as an amazing opportunity, it just was so easy to see her pour everything she had into a western and fall in love with the genre and fall in love with the footage.

Every single person I spoke to had a story that was so precise and so detailed. Camera operators talking about she insisted on getting up really, really early because the dust would kick up off the ground in a certain way and you could get the horses just at this moment with the natural sunlight. And they all were like, “My God, that’s a huge pain in the ass, but we will do it because Halyna was so excited about it.” And there you go. And you have this shot that might have not even been in the script, but it made it into the film because she really committed herself in a bigger sense to every single image in the film.

Going forward, how do you think Halyna and her memory will continue to influence your work as a filmmaker and artist?
I feel Halyna hovering over me at every moment. In fact, the project I’m working on now is a murder investigation. And as I was beginning, it was an unsolved murder and I was starting off in my first interview and Halyna had just died. I sat down with a prime suspect in this murder investigation, and he said to me, “Are you sure you want to do this? I know your friend just died.” And I heard her voice in the back of my head saying, “Absolutely. You need to do this, Rachel. Go do your thing. focus and stay focused and do it and keep going.”

That is Halyna’s voice in my head whenever I’m in between a rock and a hard place. I just hear her say, “Go forward.” And it pains me, to not actually have her with me. But I do hear her voice in that way. It … makes me emotional.

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