Raising Mentally Strong Kids, with Dr. Daniel Amen, and Inside the Tragic "Rust" Set Shooting, with Rachel Mason | Ep. 1039

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at New East. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We're going to talk parenting for a minute.
How do we raise confident, able kids in our post-pandemic, always online annoying society? My next guest may be familiar to you if you spend any time on Instagram, which is where I found him. He's got some amazing advice for all of us.
Dr. Daniel Amen is a double board certified psychiatrist, including of child psychiatry and author of the book, Raising Mentally Strong Kids, how to combine the power of neuroscience with love and logic to grow confident, kind, responsible, and resilient children and young adults.
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Welcome to the show, Dr. Amen.

Great to have you.

Hi, Megan.

What a joy.

I followed your work for a long time. I'm a huge fan.
Oh, gosh. Thank you for saying that.
Likewise. So I always love your posts.
They always make sense to me. I always get like an additional pearl of wisdom that I didn't have before.
But the one that made me say, could we please book him? Please get him on the show was one in which you were talking about. This is the condensed version.
Today, parents do way too much for their children and they steal their self-esteem. You are making the point that you may think you're doing all the household chores or whatever it is.
In our neighborhood, all the parents drop their kids off at the bus stop. Like, what? Right? Back in my day, we had to walk to the bus stop and wait for the, like, they sit in these beautiful SUVs and whatever.
You may think you're helping or being kind to your child and you are making the point, that's a you thing. You're doing that to make yourself feel good and you are stealing something important from your kid in the process.
Let's kick it off there. Well, because parents are working so hard, they often have this tremendous guilt about not spending enough time with their children.
And so they do, do, do, do, thinking it's somehow benefiting them, but really it's building the parent's self-esteem by stealing your child. There's this great study out of Harvard where they followed kids literally over 70 years looking at what goes with health, success, and longevity.
And the only thing

that went with self-esteem was whether or not you worked as a child, whether or not you had a paper route, or you had chores at home, or you actually, like me, I had a job. My dad owned grocery stores, And from the time I was 10, I went to work.

And what working does is it boosts your sense of competence and competence is directly related to self-esteem. So if you're solving all of your children's problems, they don't feel competent and thus don't feel very good about themselves.
Yes. No, I see this with parents all the time where they solve their child's problems, not necessarily speaking about homework, but just the kid comes up with, well, this kid did this to me.
And rather than teaching the child how to think it through, they say, this is what you should do. And I think a lot of parents enjoy the dependency that results from that.
No question that they get in their mind more connection. Um, and you know, I mean, it's so rewarding.
Take the wisdom you gained over decades and pour it down your child's brain. The problem is it just doesn't work.
What we're teaching them is to not be competent. And when a child says, I'm bored, rather than go, well, you could do this or you could do that, or how about we do this together?

Just repeat it back. It's like you're bored.
I wonder what you're going to do about it. And then be quiet long enough for them to generate their own solutions.
Parents talk way too much. And in raising mentally strong kids,

I talk about the first thing is know what you want. What kind of parent do you want to be?

What kind of child do you want to raise? I want to raise mentally strong kids. Well,

that means I have to teach them to solve problems. I can't do it for them.
And then the second thing

And mentally strong kids. Well, that means I have to teach them to solve problems.
I can't do it for them. And then the second thing, it's bonding.
And bonding requires two things, time, actual physical time. Parents are so busy and so distracted by their own devices that they're not spending time with children.
And really important, a willingness to listen. So when your child says something on board, rather than solve it for them, go, just repeat back what you hear.
It's what therapists do all the time, at least. Right.
And wait for them to fill in the blank because they're filling it in using their brain to generate options. And what if they say, what can I do? What can I do? Mom, what can I do? Like, I wonder, what can you do? And then be quiet so that their brain works to fill in.
Now, after five minutes, if they're like, what can I do? What can I do? Do you want to hear maybe what other kids might do and then generate options? But you know, as soon as you generate options, they're going to argue with them. But I think what you said is very interesting, like how to build, everybody wants to build mentally tough kids, resilient kids.
Now, growing up in the seventies, the way that my mom did it was she just insulted me a lot. I'm kind of joking, but it's, there's a little truth to it.
I don't know. She just, she didn't coddle us is my point.
Never coddled us. And she never told us we were good at something that we weren't good at ever.
So I always had a very keen sense of what was an actual skill versus a fake skill. You know what I mean? I never overjudged my capacity for something.
Now, I'm a lot nicer than my mom was. So then I worry, am I going to raise soft kids? Do I need to insult them more? What is the way forward? Well, I think the way forward is bonding and connection and modeling.
You really want to raise brain healthy kids is you have to live the message. You have to model it.
And the more you model a healthy brain, a healthy mind, healthy relationships, if your children like you, and this is very important, if they don't like you, they pick the opposite values. So growing up, I did not have a good relationship with my dad.
He worked all the time. The only time I saw him is when I went to work with him and he tended to notice what was wrong about me more than what was right about me.
1972, I turn 18.

It's the first time I can vote.

He says, if I vote for McGovern, the country will go to hell. I vote for McGovern and the country went to hell, but it had nothing to do with McGovern.
It was all Nixon. But it was the lack of bonding and connection that drove me to do the opposite of him.
If he would have spent time with me, listened to me. Now I'm one of seven, so it was chaos in my family.
But it would have been much different. Now, later on in life, he's's my best friend and we vote in a similar way but it's so important that connection and that bonding is not doing everything they want you to do bonding is time it's listening and helping them learn to be competent can we talk about the advice giving? Because we mentioned this a second ago, you know, about helping them solve their own problems and maybe helping them walk the path with the right questions they should be asking.
But can you speak to the difference between, if there is any, that process when you're dealing with, let's say my kids are 11, 13, and 15. And then my friend who I talk to a lot about her adult children who are more like 31 and 29, she desperately wants to weigh in on who they're dating or their latest job choice.
And I'm over here like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, not at that age. But at my ages, I think you do have to be more vocal about your opinions.
I don't know. Am I wrong?

well you know i think always default to firm and kind and yes 11 13 15 they need guidance i always say god gave you parents until your frontal lobes develop. So the front third of your brain is called the prefrontal cortex.
It is actually not fully developed until you're 25. And that's why we need to do a much better job of protecting young developing brains, like not giving them access to social media until they're 14, 15, 16, just because it's so toxic there for them.
So being involved and supervising them, and kids hate it when you supervise them. And they hate it more when you don't.
Because in their mind, it's like you don't care. So, I mean, until my kids were 17, 18, I want to know where you are, who you're with, what you're doing.
And, oh, by the way, I'm going to check. And now we have ways to check that were much better than when my kids

were young. And so, but when they're old, your job is to be sort of a good friend and a good coach.
And never forget, I'm always a long-term planner. Never forget, they're the ones that are going to be taking care of you when you are 90.
And so I'm always sort of kind to my children. But if I do too much, I create dependence.
And that's absolutely not what you want when they're 25 or 30. Well, and also I worry that you create resentment.
I worry,

you know, in, in expressing your real opinion about, let's say, you know, the daughter's

boyfriend, if the daughter's 27, I don't know. I feel like at that age, they're going to do what

they're going to do. And I would be very hesitant.
I would feel like my role was more to be like,

you know, you'll figure it out. How do you feel when you're around? Just ask questions as opposed

I'm like, he's a shit. This is definitely not the one for you.
You have a greater likelihood of you either throwing her into his arms just because it's okay for you to think your guy's bad, but if anybody else thinks it, then you're defensive of him. Um, or her just, I don't know, clamming, clamming up and not sharing future things with you.
Yeah, no, I think it's that line, but if you really think he's a shit, you need to tell him because you need to tell her because new love is a drug. New love is just like you've been taking cocaine and you're not thinking rationally.
And often it takes six months, a year, 18 months for you to see, oh, this person's really not great for me. And it goes back to the relationship.
If they know you want to spend time with them, that you're listening to them, that you're rooting for them like a good coach. I always think, you know, who's the best teacher you've ever had? Who's the best coach you've ever had? They notice what you do right.
And they teach you when you could do better. And too often, parents that are ineffective notice what you do wrong and never let you forget it.
And so maybe a little bit like your mom, clearly like my dad. And that's not effective because if he goes, oh, you shouldn't do this.
My mind just to oppose him is like, well, I think I should do that. That's exactly what I'm going to do.
Yeah. Somebody once told me that, uh, we've had many, many dog trainers because we have a very naughty boy in our dog family.
And, uh, somebody said it's the same way that you would raise a good kid. Um, expected behavior is not commented on great behavior.
Good extra behavior is praised fully and, and vocally and negative behaviors are ignored unless they can't be, you know, unless like he's in the process of biting somebody and like intervention is required. But I kind of like that, right? It's like, you don't thank your kid for unloading the dishwasher because that's an expected chore.
That's part of being a member of this family. Same way they don't expect, you know, I don't expect them to thank me for making my bed, you know, like that kind of thing, but like an, an extra kindness or an extra moment of politeness or of them like looking out for each other, stuff you want to see a lot, lot more of.
Yeah. I've vocally praised that profusely.
Well, there's a part in the book, Raising Mentally Strong Kids, that I just loved so much. And I collect penguins.
In my office at work, I have dozens of them. And the reason I collect penguins is, so I have six kids and three of them are adopted and I adopted, uh, my oldest and he was hard for me, um, argumentative oppositional.
And I really didn't like being a dad. Um, I'm like, this is just no fun at all.
And I was a child psychiatry fellow. So I was doing my child psychiatry training and I'm talking to my supervisor about it.
And she says, you have to spend more time with him, which was sort of the last thing I wanted to do. And I was living in Hawaii at the time.
That's where I did my child Skytree fellowship. And I took my son to a place called Sea Life Park, which is on Oahu.
And like SeaWorld, they have sea animal shows. And we went to the Killer Whale show, and that was great, and the dolphin show.
But at the end of the day, he grabs my shirt and he goes, I want to see Fat Freddy. And I'm like, who's Fat Freddy? It's like the penguin, dad, don't you know anything? And so we went to the Fat Freddy show.
And it's this little chubby, humble penguin, who is amazing. He comes out onto the stage, he climbs like a 12 foot ladder to a diving board goes to the edge of the board, bounces, and then jumps in the water.
And I'm like, whoa. And then he gets out of the pool, bowls with his nose, counts with his flipper, jumps through a hoop of fire.
And at the end of the show, the trainer asked him to go get something. And Freddy went and got it.
And he brought it right back. And at that moment, time stood still for me.
And I'm like, I asked this child to get something for me. And he wants to have a discussion for like 20 minutes.
And then he doesn't want to do it. And I knew my son was smarter than the penguin.
So I go up to the trainer afterwards. I'm like, how'd you get Freddie to do all these really cool things? And she looked at my son and then looked at me and said, unlike parents, whenever Freddie does anything like what I want him to do, I notice him.
I give him a hug and I give him a fish. And even though my son didn't like raw fish, I realized I was like my dad.
When he did things I liked, I paid no attention to him at all. And when he didn't do things I liked, I gave him a ton of attention.
So I was inadvertently teaching him to do bad things to get my attention. So I'm dense.
I collect penguins as a way to just remind myself every day, notice what you like more than what you don't like. And we have a new study.
So I have 11 clinics around the country. We do brain imaging.
If you came to see me, we'd want to look at your brain before we gave you medicine or anything like that. And I have a brand new, huge study coming out on negativity bias, negativity versus positivity.
It's really the Fat Freddy story. And if you're more negative, you have less function in the front part of your brain as opposed to if you're more positive.
And so I'm a huge fan of accurate thinking with a positive spin. So not positive thinking because that can get you into all sorts of trouble, but accurate thinking with a positive spin.
I feel like that's my bread and butter for the most part. In fact, believe it or not, this year for Lent, I gave up negativity, which is, it sounds like a cop-out, but it was designed around what you're talking about.
Now, I kind of give myself the two hours off of this show because I got to do the news in the way I do the news. I can't mess with it.
But in the other 22 hours of the day, I'm trying to give up negativity and I'm not a negative person. I think I am an accurate person with a positive spin.
But I have noticed now that I've made a point of it, how many times I'll say, you know, like, Oh, I can't stand that. Or that sucks.
Or we wait, we played the game padel over vacation, which is not paddle and it's not pickle. It's padel.
It's big in Europe. It's like a racket sport.
And, uh, everyone in my family is great at racket sports, but I am not. And instead it's little things, but instead of being like, oh my God, I suck.
I was saying things like, I'm not, I'm not quite good yet. I'll be better the next time.
It's just these little things. And then I read that you're big on starting the day by saying, this is going to be a great day.
And I've been doing it. It's just these little, little pick me ups, doc.
They actually have been making a nice difference in my life.

Well, if you start the day with today is going to be a great day. And my favorite one is end the day with what went well today.
It's a great exercise to do with the kids. But when I go to bed at night, I say a prayer and then I go, what went well today?

And go through my whole day looking for what was right rather than what was wrong. And the bad stuff shows up, but I'm like, nope, this is not your time.
And people who do that within three weeks notice a significant difference in their level of happiness. And imagine if you just do it with the kids at whenever you have a meal together, it's like, hey, what are you looking forward today? Hey, what went well today? What you're doing is you're training positivity bias in their minds.

And my wife, Tana, she and I do a podcast together. And we just did a big podcast on negativity versus positivity bias.
And her mom died just about a year ago. And both she and I noticed she was more negative.
And that's what grief does. But as she worked on it, what she said is, I find the micro miracles in my day.
Even the little things, like I make her a cup of brain healthy hot chocolate every night. And she's like, just the first taste is a micro miracle.
And it's a practice that you can do. And, you know, the most effective way to raise mentally strong kids is you be mentally strong yourself.
and that's why I'm so grateful you follow me on social media because that's the whole goal

is I was just at the White House and I hate the term mental illness. It shames people.
It's stigmatizing and it's wrong. These are brain health issues that steal people's minds.
The brain, physical function of your brain creates your mind. And so as your brain is healthier, your mind is just better.
And so getting our food right, exercise. And I love we're talking about coordination exercises, because people who play racket sports live longer than everybody else.

Wow. coordination exercises, because people who play racket sports live longer than everybody else.
People who play football and soccer live less long than everybody else. I did the big NFL study when the NFL was sort of lying.
It had a problem with traumatic brain injury in football. I scanned and treated 400 NFL players.
And what we should be doing with kids is playing racket sports. And I think one of the best things my mom did with me, she's great at ping pong.
And I played table tennis growing up. And I love table tennis, tennis.
Those are the things to do with kids rather than put them in soccer or football, where on average, every year they get a concussion. Right, right.
Oh, it's a table tennis is hilarious. It's great.
My kids love it. They're very good with all raggeds.
They have the Doug Brunt, my husband's hand. I, I don't yet have it.
I'll maybe this will be my year, but I have dreams of secretly going to the ping pong places, a table tennis place, not far from where I live and like saying I'm working out or something else. And then in the summer, when we really play a lot of it, busting out my ninja skills on my kids and bam, showing that like, they're like those Olympic with the, it's great to watch.
Even my 11 year old has to go easy on me now because he's so good at it. But that's interesting with the table tennis before we leave that this topic, what is a brain healthy, hot chocolate? What tell us all everyone wants to make it now.
It's so good. Um, but before I do that, get a coach.
Go to the USATT.org, United States of America,

Table Tennis Association.org. Get a coach.
The more you work it, the better you will become.

It's a cerebellar function, which is a very critical part of the brain. And if you didn't

develop that when you're young, you can totally develop it now. So brain healthy, hot chocolate, raw cacao, organic raw cacao, unsweetened almond milk, heat up the almond milk, put a heaping teaspoon of raw cacao.
There's a company I like, no financial connection to them, called Sweet Leaf. They make 11 different flavors of Stevia and their chocolate is unbelievable.
And put in a couple of dropper fulls, put in a blender. It's so good.
And literally, And it's it's calorie smart right it's about 30 to 60 calories it tastes great it loves you you love it and it loves you back so it's just those two things almond milk and uh what was the third thing so rawacao, unsweetened organic almond milk and chocolate stevia from Sweet Leaf. Oh, I see.
Okay. All right.
And how much of the chocolate stevia goes in there? Just like a packet or what? It's a liquid. It goes to whatever your taste is.
Some people like it a little bit better. Some people like it super sweet.
So my grandfather was a candy maker. And so I like sweet things.
Oh, all right. That's good.
I can do this. All right.
Now, wait, let's go back to the brain scans and what you were saying about mental illness. So fascinating.
So if, if somebody comes into you and says, I I'm depressed or I have anxiety or whatever it is, is the first thing you would do as a psychiatrist, a brain scan, you wouldn't just be like talk therapy or the big thing now is take this drug. Well, how would you know, unless you looked? So I'm double- Nobody looks.
And I belong to the only medical specialty that virtually never looks at the organ it treats. And so for the last 34 years, we've been doing a study called brain-spec imaging, looks at blood flow and activity, looks at how your brain works.
And Megan, literally, it has changed everything in my life, how I diagnose my patients, how I treat myself. If you date my daughter for more than four months, I'm going to scan you because I really want to know.
We have a poster. I don't know if you heard the president and the Department of Justice, but he's about a conversation he had with the Mexican president.
And it's like, why doesn't Mexico have the drug problem we have, even though you're selling us the drugs? And they have a very vigorous drug education campaign. Well, as soon as I started scanning people in 1991, I'd take a healthy scan.
And then one of my marijuana users, cocaine users, alcoholics, their brains look so bad. And we put it on a poster and called, which brain do you want? Which now hangs in about 100,000 schools, prisons, churches around the world.
It's like the real reason not to use drugs is they damage your brain. Alcohol is not a health food and marijuana is not innocuous.
We have to stop lying to the American public and go, these are not good things. But the first thing you have to do is get them to fall in love with their brain.
And that's what the imaging did for me. It's your brain is involved in how you think, how you feel, how you act, how you get along with other people.
And when your brain works right, you work right. And when it doesn't, you'll never live up to your potential.
So now you go drugs damage the brain. And why would you ever damage your potential unless you are self-defeating? So what, well, what could you see in a brain scan that would change the way you would help somebody coming in with any one of those things or other things people see a psychiatrist for? Well, one of the big lessons I learned from imaging is mild traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric illness that nobody knows about because psychiatrists never look.
So your suicidal ideation, your depression, your panic attacks, your ADD or learning disabilities could have been from the car accident your family was in when you were four. Or I have one patient depressed his whole life fell off the hood of a minivan when he was 18 months old, unconscious for a day.
They thought it was a minor injury. Years later, I could still see it.
We can see evidence of toxicity from substance abuse, but we also see evidence of toxicity from mold exposure or from Lyme disease. And so I think in the future, there's going to be a whole sub category of psychiatrists that just focus on infectious disease.
Like I have hundreds of COVID scans and COVID causes an inflammatory bomb that just goes off in your brain. Depression is like chest pain, right? Nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain because it doesn't tell you what causes it and it doesn't tell you what to do for it.
Depression's the same way. Is your brain low in activity, so I have to stimulate it? Is it high in activity and I have to calm it? We can also see, I've published another study this year on childhood trauma, childhood trauma,

emotional trauma leaves a lasting signature in the brain.

And treatments like EMDR, a specific psychological treatment for trauma, help reset help calm things is that the prince harry

thing that's the prince harry thing like i can't remember it's like tapping right that's tapping could be part of it i like the eye movement part of it wow this is gonna come as such good news to so many people who just think like, uh'm this way. But maybe it's it is like a physical ailment that you could address.
Is there and on that front, is there a way? Because like if you say you hurt your brain when you got that concussion when you were 10, you know, that seems like something I'm kind of stuck with. But you're saying no, absolutely not.
And so in my NFL work, 80% of our players got better when we put them on a rehabilitation program. And these are damaged brains, right? Some of our players like Dick Butkus, you know, he played for decades and had tens of thousands of hits to his head.
He called me his brain savior because on the right treatment, his brain just a couple of months later was much better. And that's the big news in neuroscience is you're not stuck with the brain you have.
You can make it better and I can prove it. And every day your brain is part of your brain called the hippocampus.
Really interesting. It's shaped hippocampus is Greek for seahorse because that's how it's shaped.
Every day it makes 700 new stem cells. So every day your brain is making 700 new baby seahorses that are involved in mood and memory, and your behavior is either growing them or murdering them, right? If you have to have two to four glasses of wine at night, you're murdering the babies.
If you're smoking a lot of pot, you're murdering the babies. I posted something two days ago that if you're under 50 and smoking marijuana, you have a sixfold increase of having a heart attack.
It's like, whoa, not good for the blood flow in your body.

If you go to bed a half an hour early tonight,

you're growing your seahorses.

If you take a multiple vitamin and fish oil

and optimize your vitamin D level,

you're growing your seahorses.

If you eat food you love that loves you back,

like brand healthy hot chocolate, you're growing your seahorses. And Megan, it comes down to one question.
And I played this game with my daughter, Chloe, when she was little. Is this good for your brain or bad for it.
And if you can answer that with information and love, love of yourself, love of your family, love of the reason God put you on earth, is this good for my brain or bad for it? You just start making better decisions. Wow.
What about dementia, Alzheimer's? When you do these scans, when somebody comes in, is that, I know there is some sort of a test that can show you that now, but do you see that? And to me, it's just such a scourge that we haven't figured out how to prevent or heal, stop, cure those problems. So many, probably 6 million Americans, right, have Alzheimer's.
It's a crazy number. Yeah.
Estimated to go to 15 million Americans by 2050. And 19, no, 2005, I wrote a book called Preventing Alzheimer's and got no end of grief from my colleagues.
They're like, no, you can't do that. And I'm like, no, you can do it.
And last year, the Lancet published an article that said 50% of Alzheimer's disease is preventable. How you prevent it is you prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind.
And I have an acronym called Bright minds. And like B is blood flow, R is retirement and aging, I is inflammation, G is genetics, H is head trauma.
And you know, your risk and spec scans can tell 20, 30 years ahead of time, if your brain is headed for trouble. And some people go, oh, I don't want to

know. It's like, of course you want to know.
If you knew a train was going to hit you, wouldn't

you at least want to try to get out of the way? And we screen hearts and we screen breasts,

but we're not screening the most important organ. That's so true.
I'm going to buy all the books. I'm coming to a clinic.
I want all the tests. I want it all doc.
This is great stuff. I love that you're doing this, that this is available and that anybody who wants to tap into your wisdom can do it, including, including by buying his book.
It's again called Raising Mentally Strong Kids, How to Combine the Power of Neuroscience with Love and Logic to Grow Confident, Kind, Responsible, Resilient Children and Young Adults. Dr.
Amen, thank you so much for being here. So much love to you.
What a joy. I'm so honored.
Thank you. Oh, see you soon.
I really hope. Come back soon.
All the best. Wow.
God, don't you guys want to do it all now? Now I'm thinking about, I did get a concussion when I was a kid. I got, I had two of them, not like an athlete, but man, now I'm starting to wonder, like, remember when we talked to Maureen Callahan about sometimes if I, was it when I was stressed out, I would get more like OCD.
Maybe it wasn't OCD. Maybe it was my sledding accident in the fifth grade.
This is fascinating stuff. He's great.
You can see why I liked him so much. And you should follow him on Twitter.
Just search for him. I mean, on Instagram, he's terrific.
He's well worth the price of admission over there. Those are the things that make Insta worthwhile, not the ridiculous 17-year-olds trying to pretend they've curated this perfect life that it leads young girls to feel somehow less than.
As you know, my kids are not on social media. As they get older, it's going to get more challenging.
It's already slightly more challenging just with those around them. They're literally the only ones in their grades now who are not on it.
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Offer details apply. Four years after the fatal shooting of cinematographer Helena Hutchins on the set of the movie rust, the movie's finally set to be released.
This week we learned it will hit theaters in May. Many questions remain about what happened that fateful day, October 21st, 2021.
And a new documentary explores the events in detail, the events that led up to the accident with the cast and the crew who were there. The doc is called Last Take, Rust and the Story of Helena, and it's now available on Hulu.
Here's an emotional clip from the documentary of the director who was also shot Joel Sousa finding out about Halina that night. I've never before since had a moment like that where I'm laying there and I was, you know, wound in my, and I'm sort of...
I remember thinking that night, I'm like, I just, I didn't want to... I hoped I didn't wake up the next morning.
There wasn't a why about it. I just felt so devastated that I just thought, maybe this is a good place for it to all stop, you know? And I did wake up the next morning.
The director of the documentary, Rachel Mason, joins me now. Rachel, welcome.
Thanks for being here. Hi, Megan.
It's really great to be here. Thank you for having me.
What an extraordinary film and what a project. My gosh, it must have been very hard to put this together.
What drove you to do it? Well, thank you for that. I appreciate it.
It was hard mostly because Helena was a great friend and she was an awesome human being, great person, a mom. And the way that I know her is because my son and her son went to the same daycare together.
And there's not too many moms that I work well with and know in the industry and so her and I had that really incredible rare thing that can happen every now and then when a person connects with you on every single level because our kids would hang out and then she's just such a talented DP that we work together I would direct things and she would and she would shoot. And as you know, there's also not that many female DPs, directors of photography.
So, um, when she died, her widower, Matt actually asked me to make a film about her life and death. And that's how this all happened.
Oh my gosh. I mean, when you heard about this horrible day, because, mean, as a civilian not involved with anything and you know, on the set, I remember, I remember where I was when I heard this, I was like, what? You were so bad.
So can you just tell us how did that affect you as somebody who is her dear friend? I imagine at first you're thinking, wait, it can't be my, it can't be my friend. Like what movie, what cinematographer? Right.
Oh yeah. No, it's actually, I mean, it's still, even now this surreal, unthinkable quality of it is there because it's not just the layers of shocking twisted, you know, the last time anything like this ever happened was Brandon Lee, you know, in terms of a set with a gun, a person was, you know, injured and killed with.
So that just made no sense. And then there's this celebrity factor and this giant global news story as well.
And then the reality of Helena, who's a person with so much life left. I mean, there just was no world in which this could even be true to me.
So yeah, it took a very long time to process the reality of it.

So I remember hearing that they were going to complete the movie, not, not your documentary,

but the movie rest thinking, no, no, not, there's no way you're like, and I thought for sure that her widow or Matt would not want that, but I had it exactly backwards. As you explore in the

documentary, he, he did want it completed and so did Helena's mom. Can you talk about why? Well, I think this is one of those things as well that, you know, from a distance and from news coverage, if you were following the story and only getting certain bits of information,

you know, this is what I love about documentaries is that you really get the opportunity to speak to people on every side and have nuance and change the story based on what is really going on. And so

when we met with Helena's mom, she had spoken to Helena just before she died. And Helena herself told her how excited she was about this film and how much she

wanted to finish the film. And her mother said, you know,

every film Helena has touched matters to me, especially this last one.

Like we want to finish it. This really is important.

And if you knew Helena that made perfect sense. I mean,

Helena is so obsessed with her work. I mean, I cannot think of a single time I ever spoke to her that she wasn't talking about her last film and all the things she learned from it.
And so knowing that her mother wanted this completed, knowing her family wanted this completed, I even personally had conversations with her son because he would be curious about all of the films she was working on. So she was so intrinsically connected to her work.
You know, when you understand that the family wants something, any victim of any awful, horrific tragedy, as soon as you know what the family wants, you know, if the family wants a tree in someone's honor, you just want to do that. And so her family wanting this film done, it really was almost like a heroic effort of everybody to go back to this absolutely unfathomable trauma.
It's like walking back into a war zone. And every single person who I met on the set, completing the film was there because they were just trying to do what they could to honor Helena.
And once I understood that, I was like, wow, you people are being vilified and yet you're doing something heroic. So it really made me question my own industry.
The people on the set of Rust were really treated very badly. People were thinking of them as sort of like, wow, this is so shameless.
You're just finishing this film. And it was so wrong.
They actually had every reason to be worried for finishing the film because they could be blacklisted for association with Rust. And so they were willing to do it because they cared about Helena.
Do you know how they decided to handle the scene in the final cut of the movie? What I'm aware of is that that was actually reconstructed altogether, the whole entire scene where, you know, Jomina was killed. It was actually, there was a rehearsal, and they really made an effort to change the film and not go into that piece of it.
And, you know, I have seen the film, and honestly, it's an extraordinary film. I will say I'm biased towards the cinematography, which is so unfathomably beautiful and a testament to Helena's great talent.
But I felt, you know, it was a really sad, painful film to watch, but it was really actually magnificent as well because the crafting of the, the crafting of the film was absolutely amazing. And, uh, the director, Joel Sousa is really talented and it, it was so, I can't even imagine how hard, um, that film, it's hard to direct any film.
It's really, really hard to direct a film. Um, and especially with all that emotion and everything going on, it is where he too was shot.
I mean, he was shot with the same bullet, right? We believe it was the same bullet that hit both Joel and Helena fired from Alec Baldwin's gun, which was supposed to be not, was not supposed to have live rounds in it, but did. And one of the big mysteries of this case in the criminal proceedings that have gone down is how did that live round get in there? How did it get in there in what was supposed to be a dummy round? As I understand it, this is one of those guns where you can see the bullets.
And so when you bring out this set gun, a prop gun on a set, you need fake bullets that look like real bullets. That's why they call them dummy rounds.
They're not exactly blanks. They're something else.
And the armorer somehow had a weapon supply in there that had live rounds mixed in with dummy rounds. And that is how Alec wound up shooting Helena and Joel with this one bullet.
The real debate legally became, did he pull the trigger? He said no. Then the FBI and many experts said that's not possible.
He had to have pulled the trigger. Even some of his defenders said he shouldn't pull the trigger, but nobody, if they pull the trigger, is thinking that there's a live round in there.
And then people on the other side said, no, this is why you never pulled the trigger. So this is these are just some of the debates that were unfolding in the industry over this time.
The armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, is the daughter of a very famous, respected armorer in Hollywood. But she did not have that level of respect.
And you delve into kind of how she got this job and some of the safety questions that came up around her performance early on. Yeah.
Well, I will say firstly, just going back, no, no bullets should ever be on any movie set that is so, so unthinkable. So the very first thing that anyone in the industry, especially in the armoring profession, mostly, which is handled by people with extensive training, often military backgrounds or law enforcement, that was the very first shockwave was just to be so sickened really.
I mean, truly, we interview Andy Werth who came in to finish the film and he is a really seasoned armorer with military background and those were the words he used. The armoring profession is actually really quite amazing, the track record, very safe.
I know that sounds like a strange thing to say because this is guns, but most armorers are, I mean, I would almost say all armorers that I've ever heard of have a really high level of skill. So, you know, again, it's points to things that are a problem in our industry, in the film industry that need to be addressed and looked at how we hire people, this kind of idea that you might just be qualified because this is your father.
And in fact, that is actually quite a typical scenario in the movie industry, including on the set of Rust, there was a very lovely father and son team. And I kind of like that dynamic because you could see his special effects opera.
He's teaching his son the tricks. So that's not unusual that often people in this industry have, you know, a family connection, but in this case, you know, relying on that entirely, you know, that's, that was one of those things that you have to question.
There's so many aspects of the narrative around all of the different issues that could have happened. Um, it's all coming back to me.
I, I almost forgot that his name, Seth Kinney is the name of the guy who supplied the ammo to the

armor. And there was a bit of a, you know, finger pointing thing between the two of them where

Hannah Gutierrez Reed was like, he gave me a box of mixed live rounds and dummy rounds.

She still would have had responsibility for making sure whatever went into the guns she had on set

Thank you. of mixed live rounds and dummy rounds, she still would have had responsibility for making sure whatever went into the guns she had on set was only dummy rounds.
And he denied that he had done that. But I remember that was one of the points of contention.
She did wind up, she pled guilty, right? Was she found guilty or did she plead guilty? Why can't I remember this? She, well, a jury found her guilty and sentenced her to 18 months. And she is serving time in a correctional facility in New Mexico now.
Wow. You have a great memory.
Yes. Seth Kenney, the weapons supplier.
I mean, you know, when you sit in a courtroom, the cast of characters starts to unfold and I found it all very fascinating. And I didn't ever think about where bullets come from or, or the fact that sometimes actors know target practice and they might need to do it so they understand the feel of a real gun but that doesn't happen on a set at all shouldn't and it can't even you can't conceive of it happening anywhere near a set but could those bullets be mixed in I mean wow these are things that you it's only something horrible happens, do you even contemplate those elements.
And again, when we were watching our film, we have body camera footage. And you also see that when the cops came to the set, it was a crime scene immediately, but it was a set as well.
So you have the cop looking at Alec and saying, is that, is that real blood? And Alec is like, well, no, of course not. It's fake blood.
But it's that world of fiction meeting reality that is also like, well, it could be real blood, sir. And this is Alec being like, there's no way it could be real blood.
And in both people's minds, you are living in two alternate realities in the film world. You're making fiction.
There's no bullets. There's no blood.
It's all fake. You get at this in your documentary.
Again, it is called Last Take, Rust and the Story of Helena. It's on Hulu right now.
You get at this in part with the special effects team and one guy in particular who was talking about something called a squib, which I didn't know anything about a squib, but a squib is like something you, you kind of like it's, it's fake blood that you as a special effects guy, make sure gets on the person in the movie who needs to look like they've been shot. And just here's a, here's a bit from that.
Let's listen to stop 45. But, Megan, this is cool because I got to say, my little director brain went in and it's like, oh, I fought so hard to make sure we get that in this movie.
And you have thousands and thousands of hours of ideas and footage. And I remember specifically saying, the edit team, you guys, this matters so much because when I heard Tom Gandy, that's his name, describe a squid pack, which is the thing that explodes.
You would strap it on a person and it explodes and depends on every movie you've ever seen a person blood popping off of. It is a really kind of well-designed thing.
It goes under a person's shirt and then it pops and he has to pull that trigger. When he was explaining it, I mean, also I will say as Helena's friend, you're just like, no, please God, actually, this is so insane.
There cannot be a world in which he's watching her actual body explode for real. And he knows what it's supposed to look like when it's fake.
And he knows he didn't put that on her. So he knows it's real.
And so I was sitting there and I remember being like, oh my God, whoa, it was a real moment again to that point. Thank you for finding that clip because it was like fiction meeting reality.
And these moments when in the world of entertainment, which we all love movies, it's this question of like, well, are we putting people into a scenario where there's ever the possibility of something this real happening? And if so, it's just terrifying to imagine. You just think about the horror of those in that room, Helena, chief of all, but those around her, I mean, everybody, Alec Baldwin, all of them were horrified.
I think everyone accepts that. And the assistant director, David Halls, we talked a little bit about the armorer, but he also takes responsibility and had to because it was he was the person who handed the gun to Alec.
and the rules are that he should have checked it too. There's supposed to be all these redundancies built in

so that this can never happen.

You did speak to him.

You spoke to everybody except Alec. But here is a bit from the assistant director, David Halls, in SOT 44.
And I brought me the gun. She opened up the hatch and I saw three bullets.
And you only saw the three? I only saw the three. Okay.
Do you normally check all of them or what do you usually do? Should. Okay.
I was negligent in the inspection of that gun. It could have been a more thorough inspection.
I pled guilty. I pled guilty.
A thorough inspection didn't happen. I could have been a last line of defense.
This poor guy. I'm just watching that, and you know what I'm thinking, Rachel, is like, it's when people say it wasn't my fault.
It was someone, it was someone else's responsibility that we all pile on, that we, that we are the ones saying, no, it was you. When you hear a guy like that, you have the opposite instinct.
You know, you, you want to relieve him. That's a great point.
I mean, that is absolutely fascinating to think about that because it's, I, when I met Dave

the first time I was actually in the courtroom and, um, I had been wearing Helena's hat, which

actually is this hat right here. I wore this hat on every interview and this was the hat she wore

on the set of Rust. And, um, so he recognized it right away and he came up to me and, and crying and just like the pain that I experienced immediately, you know, seeing a grown man cry, like just that level of pain.
It's truly astonishing. And I remember feeling like, you know, initially I was like pissed at all these people.
I'm like, what the hell are you guys like? But then I was like, oh, wait, this was an unfathomable, nightmarish accident. And this guy has to actually live with the image in his head of what we're seeing in the film.
There was a moment in which he could have stopped it. But I mean, it's like the armorer, if we presume, as she says, that she did shake the bullets, because that should have been a different shaking sound from a dummy round versus a live round is what they said.
If she really did do it, who knows if she really did do it, but if she really did do it and she wasn't able to determine the dummy from the live, could David really have done it? I mean, not an ammo expert. You know, we have redundancies, but we're probably thinking on most of these sets, they're mostly unnecessary.
We're really kind of just making sure it's not, there's not like an obvious problem. And this, this wouldn't have been, um, the, the stuff with the crew really jumped out at me.
I know she was crew, obviously she was part of the crew, but as somebody who's been not an actress, but on camera for many years, you get very close to your crew and the crew guys are like truth detectors. Like they just, if you're a bitch, if you're a nightmare to work with, they know, they just know.
And these guys clearly loved her and loved working with her. And there's a, we pulled this clip of a guy named Jonas Huerta from the camera crew who also seems to to be taking responsibility.
You know, it's like, all these good guys are like, it was on me. It was on me.
It was on me. We pulled a little bit of that in Sop 43.
And the moment Helena arrived, all of our hearts dropped. She looked like blindsided.
She did not understand what was going on. She's like, what's going on? We're like, we're leaving.
Like, we're done. She's like, I don't understand.
Like, it feels like I'm losing my best friends. Our monitor wasn't working.
And she had to see the frame from the Steadicam. And I was like, well, if I was there, I could have put her monitor out of harm's way.

I could have, you know, I always made sure that she was out of the danger.

Like anytime the gun was pointed, I would make sure that monitor was safe.

Oh, he walked off along with many others that day because the set was riddled with safety concerns. Well, you know, one of the things that I pointed out is that everybody basically feels some level of survivor's guilt.
And in discussing a second ago, the idea of the different stopgaps that exist so that, you know, you don't have a gun without being checked one or two times. You also never should be standing in front of the gun.
And so his trauma comes from the fact that one of the protocols that exists is actually that you have a monitor and Helena should have never been where she was, but because they had walked off, he didn't have a chance to set that monitor up. And so he goes back in his mind and just lives with this awful feeling, which of course he shouldn't be feeling like actual real guilt.
Someone else might've gotten shot in a horrible other way if there was real bullets. But looking at these different reasons for everyone, you know, feeling these feelings,

you can see there's sort of a cascade of things that led to this happening.

And I will say, you know, interviewing the guys that walked off,

they had quite a few different things they were making noise about on the set.

And it's great. Like you see the reality of just, I mean, I'm saying crew.

Yes. I'm glad that you know what it feels like to work with crew in it.
And in a way it's like the behind the scenes, the backbone of every single thing we're doing even now there's producers, there's people we rely on deeply and yet no one ever sees them. So I was happy to be able to reveal that world because people only ever see the actors and see the main people on screen.
You mostly don't even know who your favorite DP is and what they look like, you know?

But that's a really talented-

That was her world.

Those were her, you know, frontline workers.

And I'm sure they were affected probably more than even the cast by her death.

On the subject of Alec, he was charged.

And then ultimately the charges were dismissed with prejudice, which means that we're done. He's not going to get charged again.
Um, he has a reality show with his wife and she spoke to the effect, this whole thing. I mean, the shooting, obviously he was holding the gun to the almost criminal prosecution to just the public aftermath and all of it.
And, uh, here's what she said on their TLC show recently. Everyone who is close to Alec has seen his mental health decline.
He was diagnosed with PTSD. And he says, you know, if in his darkest moments, if an accident had to have happened this day, why am I still here? Why couldn't it have been me? What do you make of that, Rachel? And why do you think he did not speak with you for this documentary? Well, gosh, you know, I just, that's the first I, I, I've, I haven't been

paying attention truthfully to, um, his reality show, but I was aware of it. And so hearing that,

um, you know, I will say there's just this agony of PTSD that exists and it's very real and there's

every single person does have that. And, and I did actually speak to Alec, um, myself, um,

Thank you. And it's very real.
And there's every single person does have that. And, and I did actually speak to Alec, um, myself.
Um, I happened to know Alec from my first documentary, which is called Circus of Books. And I got to know him at a film festival, the Hamptons Festival.
And so after this happened, I spoke to him and I, I heard that trauma in his voice, that first call. And it actually was horrifying, you know, just to hear the trauma that just like Dave Hall's, you start to understand like, wow, people have seen something that they will never get this image out of their head.
It's burned in. It is, it's a, it's a terror.
It's a, that probably gives them all nightmares. You know, I had to deal with the loss of just my friend,

which is not anything small.

It's huge.

It's vast.

I'll never get over it. But they had to deal with, like, seeing something that only exists in horror movies,

like, or, you know, just like cops and people on battlefields.

And I mean, he had to deal with the horror of actually having caused it,

you know, using that term.

Holding a gun. Yeah.
Just as a matter of fact. I mean, he definitely caused it.
So the film, it doesn't have a villain. Do you think, you know, having made it now, like, who is to blame? Like, on what do you blame the death of your friend? God, you know, blame is a really complicated word and I'm not sure I've fully grasped it because there's so many people at different moments that I felt really mad at.
And then I would open a door and be like, oh, okay, wait, I'm mad at you, but you're living in a personal hell that I'll never, you know, like Dave Hall's when I met him and I was like, wow, there's actually no prison sentence that could be worse than your own head going through this for the rest of your life.

Same with Hannah. Like, my God, she has to live with this horrific set of like feelings and the guilt of that.
So when I think about what I'm the most upset at, I think on some level, that's where this idea of examining almost like the workplace environment that allowed what I started to understand and feel could be almost any workplace. Like, you know, you think about an accident.
Now, anytime there's an accident on a set, I'm immediately keyed in. Like there was a guy who fell to his death on a Radford Studios, which is a really very high-level place here in L.A.

Marvel.

And this guy died on this set.

I'm like, oh, my God.

How would a person die on that set?

It's the opposite of Rust.

That's a Marvel film.

But then I want to go through that chain reaction.

There's this.

There's that.

And that person might have been on a smoke break. And this person wasn't wasn't here for that happening.
Why was, were people aware that there might've been a faulty rig set up? Oh yeah. People knew about this thing.
You read about it, you understand like, okay, so just like on an airplane where it won't lift off the ground until you have all the cross checks. I really feel like the same thing has to happen for a movie set.
you cannot say go until these cross checks exist or can't be a way in which there could be a gun at all that could be just in a position where it hasn't been checked where an actor happens to have it in his rehearsal and people aren't you know that that was part of the other problem there were so many different levels to this scenario this was an unplanned scene it was a rehearsal a rehearsal. And that happens all the time in films.
I'm sure you might have an idea and I'll say, hey, let's just get this cool shot. The guy's running that way.
Especially if you're in journalism and you might want to do something. Well, there's this spur of the moment act that can happen.
And when you're dealing with, it's not just, but like explosives, stunts. I spoke to the guy who actually worked on the Harry Potter film.
He was Daniel Radcliffe's stunt double, and he's permanently paralyzed. There's actually a good documentary about him called The Boy Who Lived.
And I wanted to understand what, oh my God, like you got hurled against a wall going like 80 miles an hour. Like you could have died.
You're permanently paralyzed. It was a horrific nightmare accident.
So we're in this pressure cooker environment. People are going fast and they don't know each other very well.
And I think those are some of the things that when I think of what I got the most angry with, it's like, where are the additional checks? How can we make this better? In fact, that's a line. Was it a money problem? I mean, that's what we read in the news is that it was underfunded.
Basically they were, they were trying to do it to skinny. You know, that's one of those things.
What I have to question as well, was it just a money problem? Because again, I'm looking at other film sets where, you know, they had plenty of money and someone died or got killed or had a, sorry, had an accident. And it's more about the decision making and the communication gaps, as far as I can tell, because sure, you can save money here.

But so, yeah, the decision to, again, get a lowball armorer, as Tom Gandy says in our film, that's one of those decisions. But it's it it's one of many decisions.
So when you look at this scenario, it wasn't just that. Um, and I think that's part of the issue.
Do you, maybe this is a weird question, but whenever there's tragic loss, especially if someone at a young age and a mother, a wife, I, I think it's natural to ask why, what, you know, what good could possibly come of this? Why would God allow this? Is there some greater meaning that's, that's been gleaned from it? Will it, will the death save lives? Like, is there any, is there any answer on that? That's the, the big question, Megan, you know, and I, I've went through that every single minute of every day for the last three and a half years, because not that I would want anyone to die, but like, I think about this as like, my God, of all people, Helena had everything going for her and Rust would have been the film that was going to launch her whole career. She was up for enormous jobs.
And also, you know, I'm speaking

to another woman in an industry that is heavily dominated by men, especially just like the powerhouse ones. You're like, I want you to, you're going to succeed.
Like I knew it. There was no doubt Helena was going to get an Oscar.
She was going to be up there with the top. She was and so to me her particular death was like so cruel, so unfair to all the people that knew and know her and think about her as just a rising star.
Yeah, I wonder that. And I think, and that's part of why I think the things that continue to allow her to be spoken of, like this great opportunity right here.
Thank you. Um, to speak about her,

um, to speak about what happened. Those are all things that, yes.

And I think of like, okay, can we make meaning from this?

Is that possible, um, to do it's,

you know, that, that is something I know.

I would wish I could trade this all for her in two days, like two seconds. Nope.

I would much rather have her.

Your film is trying and your film is doing it even more so than the completion

Thank you. No, I would wish I could trade this all for her in two days, like two seconds.
Nope. I would much rather have her.
Your film is trying and your film is doing it even more so than the completion of Rust because people, there will be a segment of the population that goes to see that movie that doesn't know anything about the backstory. You know, the young people who don't follow the news that much.
And, but if you watch this documentary, you will know, you will know her, you will learn some lessons about safety and redundancies and so on, how things can go terribly wrong. And I'm sure there will be a lot of industry people who are way more interested in your product than in the final movie.
They'll probably see both. And maybe they will learn something because you chose to take this on as painful as it was for you as a friend.
So hats off to you. I mean, literally hats off to you.
That's a sweet story about her hat. She was lucky to have you as a friend.
And I, I admire all the work you put into this. Well done.
Thank you for telling us the story, Rachel. Well, thank you.
And I will say, Megan, you're somebody that I, as a documentary filmmaker, I'm, I've been fascinated with you and your story and you've done a lot as well for women and media. And I, at some point want to keep following what you're up to because I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
And, um, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that

you cover. So thank you for this opportunity.
Oh, that's very kind. Good, good luck with it.

And please everybody check it out again. It's called last take, which is also a great title,

profound last take rust and the Story of Elena.

And it's on Hulu right now.

See you next time.

Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

No BS, no agenda, and no fear. Thank you.