Alec Baldwin said “I want all things Rust to just leave my windshield” as he described his criminal case over the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins as “the most difficult thing I’ve ever dealt with in my life”.
Rust debuted at the Camerimage Festival in Poland last week, three years after the prop gun US actor Baldwin was holding went off and fatally injured Ms Hutchins on the set of the Western in New Mexico.
Earlier this year, a judge threw out the involuntary manslaughter case against Baldwin.
Baldwin, 66, was honoured with a lifetime award at the 42nd Torino Film Festival in Italy on Monday.
After a press conference, where journalists were reportedly told questions about Rust were off-limits, Baldwin told Variety that he had not watched the final cut of the film but he hoped the film would be released.
“…This is obviously the most difficult thing I’ve ever dealt with in my life,” he said of the Rust incident.
“Beyond the victims themselves, the thing that most pains me is what it did to my wife. My wife has been very, very traumatised from this. There has been a lot of pain.
“When you are married to somebody and everything was going fairly well and we had seven kids … and the floor falls out.
“It’s very frightening and very disturbing. And we are trying to get the wind in our sails, to get away from this stuff. Because the film doesn’t stand by itself. It’s always going to be overshadowed by this.”
Ms Hutchins’ mother Olga Solovey said she refused to attend the Polish premiere of Rust last week, claiming that Baldwin was seeking to “unjustly profit from his killing of my daughter” in a statement shared by her lawyer, Gloria Allred.
Baldwin said the notion that anybody has profited from the film’s sale and distribution is “blatantly untrue” and “absolutely wrong”.
The actor said he was advised by mental health practitioners and cardiologists not to complete the film after Ms Hutchins’s death, because he was “very sick afterwards for a while, physically drained and ill”.
However, he decided to finish the film and waived his fee to give “everything to her husband” – who Mr Baldwin claimed now solely owns the film.
“It’s been such a tragedy, which of course we would do anything to undo,” Baldwin said.
“But we arrived to the reshoot and it was a better film in a lot of of ways. Other than Halyna. But for now, I want all things Rust to just leave my windshield, so I can go and do other things and be a father to my children.
“At this age, I’m 66 years old, and you want to have the energy for your kids. The last two years of this situation have just hammered me, just drained me.”
Baldwin shares seven children under the age of 10 with his wife, Hilaria Baldwin.
In June, the couple announced that their family will star in their own reality series.
The Baldwins, the show’s working title, will be released in 2025.
The couple married in July 2012 and had their first child in August 2013.
Baldwin was previously married to the actress Kim Basinger, with whom he has a daughter, Ireland.
