Halyna Hutchins at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2019.Credit:Getty
The period WesternRust,about a 13-year-old boy in 1880s Kansas who goes on the run with his long-estranged grandfather (played by Baldwin) after being sentenced to death for the accidental killing of a local rancher,looked as though it would push her career to a new level.
“I think she was going to be a very famous,very successful DP,” director Adam Egypt Mortimer,who worked with Hutchins on last year’s indie superhero action filmArchenemy,told theLos Angeles Times on Thursday evening. “After we madeArchenemy,people were calling me saying,‘She did good work. We’re thinking about putting her up for something.’ She was building a reputation. She was showing people what she could do.”
Halyna Hutchins on her Instagram.Credit:Instagram
Fellow cinematographer Elle Schneider,a friend of Hutchins’,wrote on Twitter after her death,“Women cinematographers have historically been kept from genre film,and it seems especially cruel that one of the rising stars who was able to break through had her life cut short on the kind of project we’ve been fighting for.”
Hutchins had taken an unusual route to Hollywood. Originally from Ukraine,she grew up on a Soviet military base in the Arctic Circle “surrounded by reindeer and nuclear submarines,” according to the bio on her personal website.
Her bio said she earned a graduate degree in international journalism from Kyiv National University in Ukraine. Before making her way to Los Angeles,she worked as an investigative journalist on British documentary productions.
“She had this amazing background that you just sort of instantly romanticise,” Mortimer said. “She had this whole Ukrainian vibe that made her seem both super cool and serious about truth.”