Actor William Hurt has revealed his perspective on the incident that led to the death of camera assistant Sarah Jones during the filming of the Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider.
Hurt had been cast in the lead role of musician Allman in the now-suspended production, and was present at the scene of the crash that killed Jones.
Speaking to the Canadian Press news agency, Hurt said: “I just had an unsettled feeling from the very time I got there. I stopped everything and I said in front of everybody, I said, ‘Stop.’ And I asked [assistant director] Hillary [Schwartz] in front of the whole crowd, ‘Are we safe?’ Because it’s her job as the first AD to tell us that. She said, ‘Yes.’”
Schwartz was later sentenced to 10 years’ probation and a $5,000 (Dh18,360) fine, as well as being banned from working in a responsible position in a film crew for 10 years, for her part in the incident.
Jones’s death occurred when a train struck a hospital bed placed across a railway track on the Doctortown trestle over the Altamaha river in Wayne County, Georgia, in February 2014; she was hit by debris from the bed and knocked into the train’s path. Filmmakers had been denied permission to film there by CSX, the company who owned the railway, and the film’s director, Randall Miller, received a two-year jail sentence and eight years’ probation for involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespassing.
Hurt says that he was told the cast and crew had a 60-second window to clear the area if a train appeared, but started work on the scene despite his misgivings. Having laid down on the bed, he said Schwartz then called a warning of an approaching train. “I was barefoot and I turned around, I twisted my head and I said, ‘Someone’s going to die now,’” he said. “I tried to yank the bed up, my feet were getting clobbered by the splinters in the ties [sleepers]. I couldn’t move the bed at all, I just started screaming, ‘You can’t stop it, you can’t stop it, you can’t stop it, you can’t stop it.’ And I picked my way across the ties, trying not to fall to impede people climbing over me who were trying to escape, too. “And then I got into the rocks which were razor sharp and I turned and I’m going, ‘Oh, Jesus God.’ I’m looking at them, I was only a few feet away from the train and I saw them, I felt the wind buffered and I just covered my eyes and started screaming ‘No, no, no, no, no, no.’” Hurt subsequently quit Midnight Rider in April 2014, after the film’s producers attempted to restart production. Gregg Allman also joined calls for the film to be shut down , and the project now appears all but abandoned.
