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Director Joel Souza ‘out of hospital’ following Alec Baldwin firearm incident

Director Joel Souza is understood to have been discharged from hospital after being injured during the firing of a prop gun by actor Alec Baldwin.

Halyna Hutchins, director of photography on Western movie Rust, was killed during the incident on Thursday, officials in Santa Fe, New Mexico, previously confirmed.

The 42-year-old was airlifted to University of New Mexico Hospital but she was pronounced dead.

Actress Frances Fisher, who stars in the film, said Souza, 48, has now been discharged from hospital.

“Director Joel Souza told me he’s out of hospital,” she wrote on Twitter.

Photographs published by The Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper show an emotional Baldwin doubled over and apparently in tears outside the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.

Shannon Lee, the sister of late actor Brandon Lee has said “no-one should ever be killed by a gun on a film set” following the incident.

Lee, 28, the son of martial arts superstar Bruce Lee, was killed in 1993 after he was shot on the set of the film The Crow.

The gun was supposed to have fired a blank, but a post-mortem examination found a .44-calibre bullet lodged near his spine.

The incidents that killed Lee and Hutchins are part of a long history of tragedies on film sets.

In 1984, actor Jon-Erik Hexum died after shooting himself in the head with a prop gun blank while pretending to play Russian roulette with a .44 Magnum on the set of the television series Cover Up.

During the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1982, a helicopter crash killed actor Vic Morrow and two children, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, while filming a scene involving explosions, which damaged the helicopter’s rotors.

In 2002 Vin Diesel’s stunt double on the action film xXx, Harry O’Connor, died while he was performing a paragliding stunt.

A stunt expert was also killed on the set of Batman film The Dark Knight.

Conway Wickliffe was leaning out the window of a car operating a camera when the vehicle crashed into a tree.