(Los Angeles) Police officers should be present on all shoots that use firearms, said actor Alec Baldwin, who accidentally killed a filmmaker last month while rehearsing a scene from a movie with a gun he said on Monday. he had been presented as harmless.
“Every movie or television shoot that uses firearms, dummy or not, should have a police officer on set paid by the production to ensure the safety of the guns,” Alec Baldwin wrote on Twitter.
On October 21, the director of photography for the western Rust, Halyna Hutchins, had been mortally wounded by a gunshot fired by the American actor, who was rehearsing a scene where he had to draw his revolver.
The weapon had been presented to him as “cold”, which means that it is supposed to be inert and harmless in the parlance of the cinema. But it contained real ammunition.
Gunsmith Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, in charge of the firearms on the set, said she was unaware of the presence of live ammunition, in theory banned from filming by very strict industry rules.
The police investigation is still ongoing and, if no arrests have been made, criminal prosecution is not ruled out if responsibility is established.
Alec Baldwin, who is also a producer of Rust, had deplored this “accident” which had according to him “a chance in a trillion” to occur. The American actor says he cannot comment on the facts themselves while the investigation is ongoing.
Since the drama, voices have multiplied to demand better control of firearms on set, or even their outright abandonment in favor of dummy weapons and special effects added later.
A petition to this effect had collected 110,000 signatures Monday and star actor Dwayne Johnson, one of the highest paid in the world, pledged last week to no longer use live firearms in his films.