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The 24-year-old head armorer in charge of guns on the Alec Baldwin film where cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was tragically shot and killed on Thursday had admitted she wasn't sure she was ready for the job in an interview before filming started.
'I almost didn't take the job because I wasn't sure if I was ready, but doing it, it went really smoothly,' Hannah Gutierrez-Reed said in a podcast interview last month after leading the firearms department for The Old Way, starring Nicolas Cage - her first time as head armorer.
She also admitted in the podcast interview that she found loading blanks into a gun to be 'the scariest' thing because she did not know how to do it and had sought help from her father, legendary gunsmith Thell Reed, to get over the fear.
It comes as crew on the film revealed they walked off set hours before the fatal accident over safety fears after firearms were accidentally discharged three times - including once by Baldwin's stunt double who had been told the gun was not loaded, and twice in a closed cabin.
A search warrant released Friday said that Gutierrez-Reed laid out three prop guns on a cart outside the filming location, and first assistant director Dave Halls grabbed the gun from the cart and brought it inside to Baldwin, unaware that it was loaded with live rounds.
'Cold gun!' shouted Halls before handing the gun to Baldwin, using the phrase to signal to cast and crew that the gun was safe to fire for the scene, the warrant said.
Seconds later, filming a scene inside an Old West-style church, Baldwin apparently aimed towards the camera and pulled the trigger, accidentally killing Hutchins as she filmed him, and injuring director Joel Souza, who stood behind her.
Unionized workers had walked off the set hours before the fatal shooting, after they complained about long hours, shoddy conditions and another safety incident days earlier involving 'two misfires' of a prop weapon.
A yet-unnamed prop master who oversaw the gun used in the fatal shooting was a non-union worker who was 'just brought in' to replace the workers who left over safety concerns, a source involved in the movie told the New York Post.
Unionized employees had been complaining about the fact they had to stay overnight in Albuquerque - an hour's drive from the set - and not Sante Fe because production wouldn't pay for their hotels, according to sources cited by The Los Angeles Times and multiple social media posts by film and TV insiders.
When they turned up to set to clear their things on Thursday, they found they'd been replaced by locals.
It begs the question of who those local workers were, what their training was and to what extent did they check the weapon before it was handed to Baldwin.
Deadline also cites an unnamed source who said a gun had gone off 'in a cabin' while someone was holding it, days prior to the shooting that killed Hutchins.
'A gun had two misfires in a closed cabin. They just fired loud pops – a person was just holding it in their hands and it went off,' they said, apparently referring to unintentional discharges.
