Anyone who loved Halyna Hutchins expected her to become a name. At 42, Hutchins had worked her way from photojournalism to cinematography, building an impressive portfolio that was beginning to court attention in Hollywood. Her work alone attracted Joel Souza, a writer-director, who hired her in 2021 to be his director of photography for a new western called Rust, to film in Santa Fe that October. “She absolutely would have become a household name as a cinematographer,” said Rachel Mason, one of Hutchins’s close friends and the director of the new Hulu documentary Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna. “Anyone who knew her had absolutely no doubt she was going to be on the highest level, winning awards, becoming well-known for that.”

Hutchins didn’t get the chance. Instead, she became a household name in death, after a weapon the actor Alec Baldwin was holding, which unbeknownst to him was loaded with live rounds, accidentally discharged during filming. A bullet from the prop revolver passed through Hutchins, who was leaning in close directing the camera, and lodged in Souza’s shoulder. Souza was hospitalized and recovered.

The accident, subsequent investigations and eventual trials – Baldwin and the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, were both charged with involuntary manslaughter – made headlines around the world and sparked calls for greater safety on film sets. Hutchins’s name always appeared next to a celebrity’s or the word “killed”, if she was mentioned at all. “This unimaginable thing happened and she overnight became very well-known for not the reasons we all expected her to become well-known,” said Mason. “It just felt so wrong and so unfair.”

Mason, who first met Hutchins when their sons attended the same daycare, experienced what many in the film, including numerous co-workers from the Rust set, recall as a nightmare of attention and speculation – what happened, how, who was to blame? “When any type of personal tragedy becomes public, it is a compounded trauma,” she said. As part of working through it, Hutchins’s widower Matthew asked Mason to direct a documentary focusing on Halyna, with the aim to “simply right the wrong of her being known as a person that was a victim of a gunshot at the hands of a celebrity”.

But in order to do so, she had to dig into the details of the tragedy, to pick at the wound. “I realized that I couldn’t make a film about her life if I didn’t understand how she died,” Mason says in voiceover during the film’s opening minutes. Last Take is, in part, about Halyna – her artistry, her vision, her family and her ambition, with access to her personal texts, photos, videos and journals up to and including her last day on set. But it is also just as much an investigation into what exactly happened on the Rust set on 21 October 2021, via crew testimony, expert witnesses and the footage that exists from that day, from the film and from police body cameras.

That split focus may seem counter-intuitive to the film’s explicit goal of celebrating Halyna’s life, and drew some criticism from Souza during a screening last week in Los Angeles: “I hoped it might have a little more Halyna in it or been a little more about Halyna,” Souza said, addressing Mason and the producer Julee Metz. But Mason maintained that the developments in the understanding of what happened on set – investigations, trials – contributed to a shift in focus. “As we were working on the film, the story kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” she said. “There was more news, there were trials, and there were things that I couldn’t have imagined when I first started. I just wanted to focus entirely on Halyna and her body of work, the people that she knew and she worked with, and not so much on Rust.”

But getting to know the people who worked with Halyna on what would be her last project – interview subjects include the camera assistant Lane Luper, the costume designer Terese Davis, the assistant director Dave Halls and Souza, among others – “was so impactful, and it told part of Halyna’s own story”, she said. “And it was a part that I had to learn about, because it helped explain exactly what happened.

“All of her friends felt just this horror of unanswered questions. Everything was just ripped out, and we all wanted answers,” she added. “I don’t know if I feel satisfied with all the answers, but I got as much as I could possibly get by going through this process.” Those answers do not go beyond existing reporting on what happened that day, but expounds on failures on many levels that contributed to, as Mason put it, “a cascade of terrible things”. This includes the chaos of a low-budget independent film set strained for time and money and a culture of ad hoc solutions that did not pause for safety concerns, including two prop guns that accidentally misfired in the days before the fatal shooting; the day before the accident, several of Hutchins’s camera crew quit, citing in part concerns over the haphazard handling of firearms on set. The next day, Halls failed to properly check the prop revolver handled by Gutierrez-Reed, a green armorer hired for a rate no one else would agree to, before it was given to Baldwin; Baldwin pointed the gun at Hutchins, under her close direction.

Not everything is clear – the film ends with a title card noting that “questions remain about the origins of the live ammunition on the set of Rust”, though many suspect the bullets originated, by accident, from Gutierrez-Reed, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to the maximum 18-month penalty of prison time in New Mexico. “It’s painful to not have answers to some basic, fundamental things,” said Mason. “I would love to live in a world where I got even more answers, but this is where we landed and that’s all we have right now.”

What to do with the answers that emerged is another question. As one crew member notes: what does justice look like for an accident? Incarceration? Gutierrez-Reed is serving prison time, and Baldwin was put on trial, though the judge dismissed the case, citing the state’s withholding of evidence – which is itself now an ongoing legal battle. Compensation? Hutchins’s parents, Anatolii Androsovych and Olga Solovey, and sister, Svetlana Zemko, filed a civil suit against Baldwin, Gutierrez-Reed and others, claiming negligence.

Change, perhaps – beyond the harrowing details and footage of this one horrible day, Last Take paints a portrait of an industry and creative pursuit too often content to leave safety on the back burner. “The world knows of Halyna because of the extreme exposure that this one case got,” said Mason. “Because of that, maybe we can look at workplace environments and the communication disconnects that can happen rather than point fingers ... hopefully trying to change cultures in general to be more safety conscious.”

And then there’s Rust itself, which resumed filming – with the blessing of Hutchins’s family – in 2023 in Montana, with Mason present as documentarian. The film’s new cinematographer Bianca Cline referenced Hutchins’s extensive journals and previous work, trying to preserve as much of her footage as possible. Rust premiered as Hutchins hoped it would, at the Camerimage cinematography festival in Torun, Poland, in November 2024. It is still seeking distribution in the US.

Given all its bad press, Rust will be a tough sell to US audiences, but Mason hopes Last Take will “allow the world to understand that Rust was a film Halyna cared a lot about”. The point of the documentary, even with its extended focus on the tragic accident and the perfect storm of failures that created it, was “to look at Halyna herself and what she wanted to accomplish and give her own voice and her own authority”, she added. “I hope her own words resonate the most.”

• Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna is now available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere