Lane Luper, the A-camera first assistant on “Rust,” is blasting some individuals connected with the “Rust” production, including attorney for “Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, for implying that someone had deliberately planted the live ammunition that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
“The idea of it made me sick because film sets, everybody on a film set becomes pretty close with each other,” Luper said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter published Friday. “I considered everybody on that show to be a friend, personally. I thought the fact that they were going on morning television and saying that was irresponsible, slanderous and quite frankly just disgusting. The whole idea of it was just gross.”
Luper’s comments were part of a wide-ranging discussion about working conditions on the Bonanza Creek, New Mexico, set of the film. Luper had resigned from the production along with six camera department colleagues over what he called unsafe working conditions in advance of the Oct. 21 shooting that fatally wounded Hutchins and injured director Joseph Souza.
Luper has gone on the defensive before about laying blame on any one individual on a set he considered unsafe in many categories.
Luper said there is not just one person who can be held responsible for Halyna Hutchins’ death on the film set because the “one in a trillion” catastrophe was “a perfect storm” in an earlier news interview with “Good Morning America.” “I think with ‘Rust,’ it was a perfect storm of the armorer, the assistant director, the culture that was on the set, the rushing…it was everything. It wasn’t just one individual. Everything had to fall into place perfectly for this one-in-a-trillion thing to happen.”
The shooting is still being investigated by the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office. “Rust” producers have called his allegations of unsafe working conditions “patently false.”
