Before Rust AD Dave Halls was fired from Freedom’s Path over a gun safety issue, he apparently was also involved in the injury of one of the movie’s stars.
A crew member who previously worked with Halls on the film told Rolling Stone Wednesday that the assistant director refused to provide 74-year-old actress Carol Sutton a crash pad for a scene in which her character fell to her knees after learning about another character’s death. He instead placed a “furniture pad” on the ground for her to drop down onto, and when she filmed the moment, she ultimately fell and injured herself. Assistant camera operator Quinton Rodriguez recalled:
“I remember turning to Dave, and I was like, ‘Dave, should we get her a crash pad? We should get her a crash pad.’ He was like, ‘No, she’s not going to fall all the way.’ So we had like a furniture pad instead. And she ended up fully falling over and injuring herself. A furniture pad is not a pad that you would want to fall on. You should have a crash pad. We had stunts on set. It would have taken 60 seconds.”
The extent of her injury wasn’t mentioned, but that still doesn’t negate the fact that Dave allegedly couldn’t take about a minute to make sure a cast member was protected from injury. SMH…
But that wasn’t the only incident that happened before his firing. In another instance, a crew member jumped into the shot in order to grab a coat that was blocking the camera and fell and injured herself to the point where she “couldn’t get up and out of the shot.” Instead of helping her out, though, Halls allegedly kept the cameras rolling until Rodriguez eventually called “cut” to help his colleague out:
“Traditionally, that would be where the first assistant director, whose job is safety, would call ‘Cut,’ and then step over to make sure the person was alright. That didn’t happen. My second assistant camera [operator] ended up stepping in to make sure she was alright. I cut camera on my own.”
He continued:
“A lot of his mentality was just, ‘Get the shot. And get the shot on time.’ He seemed willing to cut whatever corners were necessary to make that happen.”
As we mentioned before, his inability to provide basic safety measures for the cast and crew eventually backfired when a firearm “unexpectedly discharged,” leading to a sound crew member needing to seek medical attention. Elsewhere in the interview with Rolling Stone, Rodriguez shared some more information about the moments leading up to that incident. The cam operator shared that the scene used Civil War-era weapons loaded with a bunch of gunpowder to create a visible blast when fired, and Halls was in charge of doubling-check that the guns were cleared for the close-up shots. He explained:
“We started out in a wide shot, and we ended up doing it a couple times, and then we had to cut in the middle of the take, before the gun would have been fired in the shot. Then we moved into the close-up on the shot, and the gun obviously had not been cleared to become a ‘cold’ weapon. We went in for the take, and to literally everybody’s surprise, all eight people within a 10-foot range, the gun ended up firing right in our boom operator’s face.”
Ouch! Although the boom operator wasn’t badly injured, Rodriguez noted that he “threw his headphones off to the ground, dropped the boom mic and essentially ran from the set.” We can imagine that it still hurts even without being seriously wounded! Then, of course, Halls was fired from production that same day.
Following the Alec Baldwin shooting tragedy and now this, it seems clear as day this guy just did not give a s**t about the safety of his cast or crew. Reactions to the latest claims made against Halls, Perezcious readers? Let us know in the comments (below).
[Image via FayesVision/WENN & IMDb]
The post <i>Rust</i> Assistant Director Reportedly Injured 74-Year-Old Actress On 2019 Movie Set appeared first on Perez Hilton.
