Jeremy Renner says he refuses to be 'haunted by' the memory of his accident

April 7 (UPI) -- Jeremy Renner gave details of his accident in his first interview since the accident at his home on Jan. 2.

That's when Renner, who was operating a PistenBully snow-clearing machine, leaned out of the driver's seat without engaging the brake to check on his nephew, Alex Fries. Fries was helping him clear snow at the actor's Lake Tahoe home.

"I just happen to be the dummy standing on the dang track a little bit seeing if my nephew's there," Renner told Diane Sawyer in an hour-long interview broadcast on ABC Thursday night called Jeremy Renner: The Diane Sawyer Interview - A Story of Terror, Survival and Triumph.

"I should be inside the vehicle when you're operating. It's kind of like driving a car with your foot outside the car, you know what I mean? But yeah, it was what it was. It's my mistake. And I paid for it."

The 52-year-old was using a walker when he greeted Sawyer, who came to his Los Angeles home to interview him. He told her it was his first day fully upright since the accident.

Renner sustained severe injuries in the accident including a broken face and eye socket, broken ribs, a broken clavicle, right shoulder and both ankles, a punctured lung, and a severe head laceration. He told Sawyer he now has metal in his face, ribcage, and one of his legs and his jaw is being reinforced with rubber bands and screws.

"This whole side of my body, I don't really feel sensitivity to touch, but it'll grow," Renner told Sawyer. "I can feel it, the change already in two months. I feel hardly any of my teeth on the upper part because they went inside my face to put in two plates because of an orbital crack."

He added, "They put screws in my skull and my jaw to hold it with rubber bands. I'm learning to speak again."

Renner says he thought he was going to die, a feeling echoed by one of his neighbors who was one of the first to respond to the scene of the accident.

"At one point I was holding his head -- I wouldn't take my eyes off of him because I didn't want him to drift off," Barb Fletcher, Renner's neighbor, told Sawyer. "And at one point, he just got a clammy feel to him and he turned this gray-green color. And I feel in my heart like I lost him for a second. He closed his eyes. I really do feel like he passed away for a few seconds."

The star of the upcoming Disney+ reality TV show Rennervations says that due to his horrific injuries, he was sure he would die and wanted to if living meant a life on painkillers and being impaired. He says he wrote notes to his family while in the hospital.

"Don't let me live on tubes on a machine. If my existence is going to be on drugs and painkillers, let me go now," he said.

Renner is continuing his recovery at his Los Angeles home with an anti-gravity machine, electronic stimulation and other physical therapy.

"I refuse to have that be a trauma and be a negative experience," he said to Sawyer. "That is a moment I'm proud of because I wouldn't let that happen to my nephew. I shift the narrative of being victimized or making a mistake or anything else. I refused to be [expletive] haunted by that memory in that way."