On a ranch in northern New Mexico, where the cottonwoods and the dusty foothills have formed the backdrop of Westerns since the 1950s, Alec Baldwin was filming a new movie on Thursday afternoon when his character, an outlaw, needed a gun.

An assistant director grabbed one of three prop guns that the film’s armourer had set up outside on a grey cart, handed it to Baldwin, and, according to an affidavit signed by Detective Joel Cano of the Santa Fe County sheriff’s office, yelled “Cold Gun!” — which was supposed to indicate that the gun did not have any live rounds in it.

When Baldwin fired the gun, law enforcement officials said, it struck and killed the film’s cinematographer and wounded its director.

The assistant director “did not know live rounds were in the prop-gun” when he gave it to Baldwin, according to the affidavit, which was made as part of a search warrant application.

The results were deadly: Halyna Hutchins, 42, the film’s director of photography, was struck in the chest and flown to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, where she died, officials said. Joel Souza, 48, the film’s director, was shot in the shoulder area and wounded; he was taken to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in Santa Fe and later released.

“There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours,” Baldwin, 63, said in a statement Friday on Twitter.

“I’m fully cooperating with the police investigation to address how this tragedy occurred and I am in touch with her husband, offering my support to him and his family. My heart is broken for her husband, their son, and all who knew and loved Halyna.”

The plot of the film Baldwin was shooting, Rust, hinges on an accidental killing and its aftermath. Suddenly the movie set — on Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe County — became the scene of a real killing, and a real investigation.

Juan Rios, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said on Friday afternoon that the investigation “remains active and ongoing” and that “detectives entered the movie set today and continue to interview potential witnesses”.

“Regarding the projectile, a focus of the investigation is what type it was and how did it get there,” Rios said.

The affidavit said that the three guns had been left on a grey cart outside the structure where Baldwin was working on a scene “due to Covid-19 restrictions”. With the search warrant, the detectives were seeking additional evidence that could help shed light on the events leading up to the fatal shooting: footage or video captured during the filming.

New York Times News Service