I met Halyna Hutchins in the south of Spain, at a party for filmmakers at the Sitges Film Festival. The movie she’d D.P.’d, Darlin’, was playing there, as was a film I’d directed. Sitges is the kind of place that makes you feel blessed—drinking wine in the afternoon on the edge of the sea, surrounded by filmmakers whom you’re amazed to be among. I approached her because she looked like she was the coolest person there.

Halyna had this vibe. She was a tiny, ice blonde woman moving through the crowd in a way that reminded me of Bruce Lee. She seemed self-contained and aware that she had everything she needed within herself to be calm, no matter what came at her.

This fierce tranquility came from her total belief in film as art, and the trust she had in her own ability to make beautiful things. But in addition to this forcefield of integrity, what made her so lovely and radiant was her deep vulnerability. Her eyes always shined.

There’s a funny thing that happens sometimes when you’re looking for a collaborator. If you’re lucky, there’s a click. You don’t even have to look at the work. You’re inspired to take a leap. This is how it was with Halyna. I knew within minutes of talking to her that I wanted her to shoot my next movie. Yes, eventually I looked at her reel—mostly so I could present it to the producers—and yes, it was rad. But I knew it would be.

We were making a project called Archenemy, a very low-budget action-science fiction-superhero-psychedelic crime movie. But as soon as we started talking about it, I knew she was seeing it as a chance to explore truth and pain and love and violence and beauty through images. She was dedicated to pursuing art.

I loved so many more things about Halyna once we started working together:

— The amazing Tank Girl costume she wore to my Halloween party, just a few days after we’d hired her, and how everyone wanted to know who the hell was this unbelievably cool person who’d just showed up.

— Watching her stand on the shoulders of a burly camera department man so she could take photos through an eight-foot-high window during a location scout. She was so comfortable up there, as though she could have done the entire shoot like an acrobat.

— Hearing her whisper in Russian in the midst of a scene on the days when she had an old friend gaffing next to her. As they dialed up the neon pink, I felt like we were truly onto some European art vibe. Her Ukrainian roots always felt like a special part of her, an element of intrigue she accessed to bring another bit of depth to the world we were building.

— Seeing her collaborate with Michelle Laine and Ariel Vida, the costume designer and production designer, all three of them creating coven magic together, building and supporting one another’s ideas.

— Showing her things she hadn’t seen before. I brought her a book of Jim Steranko comics, the 1968 Nick Fury stuff, all pop art and experimental page design, and she went totally nuts over the wild panels, imagining how we could create shots like that. It was a thrill to show her something new because she was an inspiration machine—cool references in, effervescent energy out.

— When she would, every so often, tell me she missed her son and her family. She worked so hard, burning brightly for the short duration of our project, and the sweetness of how she talked about her boy was a gentle pull in a different direction than the pure art life. That sweetness defined her, shaped all her stubbornness and technical specificity into a deep soul. Levon could see it. Levon was our producer Kim Sherman’s extremely shy two-year-old, but on the days he came to visit set, he would run to Halyna, talk to her, tug on her pant leg. And he made her smile.

— Tiptoeing past her as she napped in a big armchair by a fireplace at Thanksgiving. Her husband and son went away for the holiday, but she couldn’t travel far because we were in the midst of the movie. So she drove up with me and my girlfriend to Santa Barbara, where my stepmother had rented a house to throw a huge get-together. Once again, Halyna was always so comfortable and confident. She immediately slipped into the world of this loud family, and was so cozy that she could sleep surrounded by everyone doing puzzles or drinking cider. And they all loved her instantly.

— Rewatching movies that we both knew in order to get synced up—a process of being reamazed together. And she was so good at amazement. The opening sequence of Hiroshima Mon Amour was one of her favorites. It’s a dreamlike love scene where two bodies are covered alternately in ash and glitter while Marguerite Duras’s poetic dialogue plays. She was so excited by this kind of immersive, abstract cinema, and was committed to finding a way to apply it to her own work.

— Her excitement when things fell apart. Our movie was so low-budget that any little problem transformed into a disaster. But disasters can create freedom, and she loved freedom. One night I got a call that a key actor had gotten sick and couldn’t make it in the next day. No, we couldn’t skip the day. No, we couldn’t skip ahead and shoot a different scene in the script. So I got up at 4 a.m. and watched a little bit of Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, and thought about how he and his D.P., Chris Doyle, would show up on their set and find the movie in the moment. And I thought, I’ve got Halyna, and we’ve got some incredible actors. Let’s find it.

At 6 a.m. the crew looked a little nervous to start setting up a shot while I was in the corner writing the scene from scratch. But Halyna didn’t look nervous; she was grinning, like she knew we were getting away with something. “So we’re shooting it like a European movie,” she said. And I knew this meant that we were shooting it the best way, the way that she preferred things: as art, living in the moment, finding the truth that appeared. Her gift was that she could overcome challenges. She didn’t just solve problems; she transcended them, turning obstacles into something with meaning.

She unwaveringly, stubbornly believed that she could turn a scene into art. I say stubbornly because she really would dig in. We were not going to roll that camera until the frame was right. She could withstand the storm of pressure her own stubbornness created, and she could withstand it because she knew that on the other side was something beautiful.

And now my collaborator and friend is on the other side. I hope it’s beautiful.

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