While some filmmakers have opted to do away with real guns forever in the wake of the Rust tragedy, Quentin Tarantino will do nothing of the sort. "I guess I can add digital erections to porno movies, but who wants to fucking watch that?” he rather, er, evocatively commented on a recent episode of Bill Maher's Club Random podcast (via Variety). “It’s exciting to shoot the blanks and to see the orange, the real orange fire, not add orange fire.”
In a feat of spin doctoring that would impress even the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" crowd, he added, "for as many guns as we’ve shot off in movies we only have two examples of people being shot on the set by a gun mishap,” referring to the deaths of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the Rust set and actor Brandon Lee while filming the original The Crow. “That’s a pretty fucking good record."
But while the above is more than a bit ghoulish, Tarantino does urge caution from all parties while dealing with firearms. "It’s a situation I think I am being fair enough to say that the armorer, the guy who hands him the gun, is 90% responsible for everything that happens when it comes to that gun. But the actor is 10% responsible," Tarantino said regarding the Rust situation. "It’s a gun! You are a partner in the responsibility to some degree."
This past spring, Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison for her role in Hutchins' death. Alec Baldwin, who discharged the gun in question, had his own involuntary manslaughter case dismissed "with prejudice" after it was discovered that authorities had withheld evidence. To hear Tarantino tell it, though, the fault lies with both parties. "If there are steps to go through you go through them. It’s done with due diligence and you know it’s fucking for real," he said.
"Here is how an actor can handle it," he continued. "If he went through the steps that he was supposed to go through… Like the barrel is clear, they show you the barrel is clear and that there is nothing anything wedged in there. They actually show you the barrel. And then they show you some version of 'here are the blanks and here is the gun.' Now it’s ready to go."
In a Vanity Fair interview earlier this month, his first since he was injured by a fragment of the bullet that killed Hutchins, Rust director Joel Souza expressed a very different opinion. "My recommendation is this: that no guns should ever be allowed. Nothing real that can fire anything," he said. "It should all be fake from here on to eternity. And there should still be armorers even because it’s fake, because they’re still not safe unless there’s an armorer."
