“I’m not condemning Alec. I feel horrible for the guy. It’s a nightmare,” Shannon told The Chicago Tribune. “I feel terrible for everyone on that production. But this is what happens when you lowball and cut corners and hire people that may not be qualified, and pay them next to nothing, and make the movie on the cheap. People get jobs in this business because they’re willing to work for a low enough fee. I see it all the time.”
“Rust” had a reported budget of $7 million, with Baldwin as one of the producers.
Shanoon added, “If it were up to the actor to determine whether a firearm is safe or not, you wouldn’t need an armorer in the first place. Being an armorer is a hard job, a demanding job, and I have nothing but respect for them. But in this instance, it was going into the ER and finding out your doctor isn’t a real doctor.”
He continued, “But ‘Rust’ is an example of a problem I see in filmmaking more and more these days. On smaller productions, independent productions, the producers keep wanting more and more for less and less. They don’t want to give you enough money. They cut corners, ridiculously, every which way. And they get away with it. So every time someone makes a great movie for a million dollars, it sets a precedent.”
“You shouldn’t have the actual weapon in your hand until immediately before doing the take,” he said. “Now, sometimes that doesn’t happen. Sometimes they’ll give you the actual gun to rehearse with a little closer to filming. But there’s a procedure for that. They open the barrel. They show you there’s nothing in there. They show you the chambers, they show the assistant director, and it’s a visual confirmation. The AD’s supposed to check it, the actor checks it and the armorer has checked it. All three of those people have to see there’s nothing in there. And then they hand it to you.”
He added, “With ‘Rust,’ before that gun went into his hand, [Baldwin] should have seen with his own eyes there was nothing in it. The armorer should’ve brought the gun over to him and said: ‘Here is your firearm. It is empty.’ Or maybe [the gun] has decoy or dummy rounds in it; you pull the trigger, nothing happens. But you never settle for walking up to an actor and handing the gun over without showing them what’s inside of it. Ever. That was the cataclysmic event on ‘Rust.'”