“What can we do to make this better?” Halyna Hutchins‘ quote appears in the closing credits of “Rust,” the movie in which she was shot and killed.

The production was on day 12 of a 21-day schedule when the accident and Hutchins’ death occurred. It took some 18 months to resume shooting. The production shifted from New Mexico to Montana, “for 10 million different reasons,” director Joel Souza, who himself was injured in the accident, said.

The cast and crew were invited to return, but some had to be replaced. Souza hired Bianca Cline, who had originally interviewed for the job, to continue Hutchins’ work.

The completed version of the film had its world premiere November 20 at EnergaCAMERIMAGE, the Polish cinematography festival itself mired in controversy this year, with Souza and Cline in attendance. Two days before, Souza screened the movie from his laptop for critics. He and Cline later sat for an interview with IndieWire, overseen by a lawyer.

Souza credited the inspiration for writing “Rust” to his grandfather’s love of Westerns. And to a weakness for crime stories.

“I like to write crime and cops and robbers,” he said. “I thought it would be interesting to approach a Western through that filter. I have two sons, and I thought, what if my wife and I were gone and it was up to my oldest son to take care of my youngest? What would it be like if they were on their own?”

Like Kevin Costner’s “Horizon,” “Rust” unfolds in vignettes across a wide swath of the Western frontier. But Souza’s film is much darker in tone, suffused with violence and weaponry. Despite staggering landscapes, the world is squalid and unjust. Bounty money and revenge are the motivators. The script alludes directly to films like “Unforgiven,” “Shane,” and “The Searchers.”

Souza hired Hutchins in part because she was steeped in Western movies, but also because he was looking for a woman’s perspective.

As Cline put it, “Even from the beginning, when I first interviewed, Joel told me, ‘I want to hire a woman because I want a different point of view.’”

“When Halyna was on board, we talked about our influences, and what she wanted to come across,” Souza recalled. “In the past, I would tell the cinematographer we were going to work as a partnership, then hand over a gigantic book of meticulous storyboards. I had no interest in doing that anymore. Halyna and I crafted the visual approach together, which was really fun. We figured out a common language.”

That meant avoiding closeups, giving actors more room in the frame to perform, and working with silhouettes. Souza said Hutchins cited Tarkovsky, while he brought up Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider.” Frances Fisher, so memorable in “Unforgiven” and has a small but significant role in “Rust,” is first seen in silhouette.

“We did not design that in any way, shape, or form,” Souza insisted. “We planned five frankly conventional shots, but weather and the clocks just killed us. I thought, how do we do this in one? Let’s talk about this.

“We staggered the cast at different lengths, planted her in the doorway, and now she has to face all these men in all directions,” he went on. “We just pushed in on her nice and slow. At the end, Halyna hooked me by the arm and took me off to the next shot. She was just so happy.”

Cline came on the shoot in October 2022. “It was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever made,” she admitted. “My goal was to preserve every frame of Halyna’s work that I could. Make everything feel exactly like hers.”

Cline used the same camera bodies and lenses, the same LUTs and filters and gels. A friend gave her Hutchins’ work journals, including notes about camera movements.

“I want people who watch the film to have no idea who did which shot, or who was physically at the helm,” Cline said. “I didn’t see my role as ‘director of photography.’ It was more complementing her work. The camera was all directed by her. She determined the style and where the camera should be and how the lighting should look.” (Cline is officially credited as Cinematographer.)

During a post-screening Q&A, an interviewer made the mistake of asking Cline who shot what.

“That’s a terrible question,” she snapped back. “Everything we were doing, she already did. This is Halyna’s film, and I hope that hope people watch it that way and not try to decipher who shot what.”

When I said I felt awkward singling out shots I admired, Souza tried to explain how complicated the second schedule became.

“There are some scenes that Halyna did in their entirety, and some where we maybe finished only half. When we tried to complete those, sometimes we didn’t have the actor. Sometimes it amounted to digital head replacement.”

“Sometimes silhouettes, sometimes green screens,” Cline added. “Sometimes building a matching set.”

“Take the scene where the Marshall [Josh Hopkins] is walking into an old-style gunfight in a saloon. When the Steadicam is following the action, it is three actors in a town in New Mexico. When the steadicam is leading the action, it is three different actors in a different town and different state and different season.”

Souza turned to Cline. “It’s a tribute to your team,” he said. “The manner in which you meticulously matched heights, distances, angles, composition — it’s seamless.”

Writers were warned not to bring up the shooting incident. But I told Souza my experience in a car accident, how time seemed to slow down before the moment of impact. In Souza’s case, there was no way to anticipate what was going to happen, no way to brace.

“If anything, time sped up for me,” he said. “I don’t remember a lot about that moment. I guess it’s my body protecting me in a way. But it was like everything was hyper-fast and sped up after that.”

Souza said he didn’t want to dwell on what happened, but I couldn’t resist asking what it felt like to get shot.

“I’ll tell you this, removing the emotion of it and all that, but that thing where people say, ‘You don’t feel it,’ or, ‘You’re in shock,’ that’s horseshit. I mean, it hurts like crazy.”

Several cinematographers at the festival had misgivings about screening “Rust.” There are conflicting accounts of how much Hutchins’ family supports the film. Matthew Hutchins joined as an executive producer after the hiatus, and according to Souza has had a strong influence on the film.

Camerimage hosted an emotional tribute to Hutchins in 2021, showing her accomplished 2016 short “Hidden” (directed by Rayan Farzad). The incident spurred panels and debates about safety on movie sets, all of which ultimately seemed to accomplish little.

“Camerimage was an important festival to Halyna,” Souza said. “She talked to me about how we should play ‘Rust’ here. I think it’s poignant that her first film and her final film played here. And it kills me that this is her final film.”

As the interview came to a close, Souza admitted the toll the production has taken on him and everyone else.

“It gets a little more blunted with time, but things can open up wounds,” he said. “At the end of the day, as hard as some things are to talk about, I’m really nothing but happy to talk about Halyna. I miss her like crazy. A lot of people miss her like crazy. She left a gaping hole behind.”