[THE MAIN EVENT]
I Am Ready, Warden is nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Short Film category. Director Smriti Mundhra sat down with UpRising to discuss the emotional rollercoaster she experienced documenting the last days of John Henry Ramirez, who was executed by the state of Texas for murdering Pablo Castro in 2004.
UpRising: Congrats on the nomination. How did you find this story?
Smriti Mundhra: I came across the writing of this woman named Carrie Inger, who at the time was a reporter for The Marshall Project. She covered Texas prisons — specifically death row. Her writing was really soulful, beautiful, and full of humanity about the men on death row. I was drawn to it so I reached out to her and said, I still want to make something on this topic, but not an innocent case. I wanted to make a film about somebody who admitted he committed a heinous crime, claims to have changed and atoned and really examines our capacity for forgiveness.
The doc begins by showing John’s redemption. It's hard to buy in because it’s difficult to get past the fact that he killed another human. But by the end of the doc, the ask for empathy is easier. Was that setup on purpose?
It was really important for an audience to understand the magnitude of John's crime. I wanted people to know that he had stabbed someone 29 times. I think we need to see those grizzly crime scene photos. It's important to know what he did before we can grapple with the idea of forgiveness and empathy or sympathy for John. So yeah, it was by design, because if I had softened those corners, then it would feel imbalanced and maybe a bit too manipulative.
What was the initial reaction from the victim’s son, Aaron, when you approached him about doing the doc?
Aaron did not want to participate in the film. He didn't want to be on camera, but he responded to me. I had reached out to all of the members of the Castro family, and he responded because he wanted me to know his perspective. He said, “If you're going to make a film about John, you should understand the magnitude of what he did and the impact of what he did.”
We talked a lot from that first conversation and he shared a lot about his life and the way in which losing his father in such a horrific way dominated his life since he was 14 years old. I got to understand the perspective of the victims in a way that was surprising to me.
We built a friendship and a trust. And then, about a week before John's execution, Aaron said, “Okay, I will participate in your film and I trust that you're going to tell the story in a way that doesn't make me look like a bloodthirsty villain or is going to misrepresent what I've told you.”
John’s godmother, Jan, is also hard to get in line with. Again, I think it’s because her goal is getting him off death row. That feels off to the viewer.
People have so much dimensionality that you don't really see at first glance. It's not an accident that the first image you see of her is this white hair and the American flag earrings. You make an assumption about who you think she is. The more I got to know her and spent time with her, I realized that actually it is her faith that allowed her to open her heart to someone like John and her belief that redemption is possible, her belief that it's only God who can judge.
Aaron cries after hearing that John was killed. That’s not the emotion I was expecting.
Aaron had been through this three times before. John had three prior dates of execution that were all staying. John's case was also a media spectacle in Texas and then nationally, even when his case went to the Supreme Court. So Aaron had spent most of his life seeing John in the news, being confronted by those violent images of his father's death, being called and asked for comment, pushed on his position on the death penalty, all of that really only to have what he thought would bring him justice and closure yanked away from him at the very last minute. Going into that day when we started filming, his mindset was, "I don't think this is even going to happen. And I'm going to have to go through that same regurgitating of all of that trauma again."
You see his demeanor initially and then you see it completely change when he hears the words from the radio broadcast, “John Henry Ramirez is dead.” His reaction in that moment — it was only two of us in the room besides Aaron — we just tried to disappear as much as we could. I crouched behind some kitchen cabinets so I wasn't in his line of sight, so he didn't feel like he had to articulate or process in real time for me. We tried to give him as much privacy and space as possible to process in real time.
The film uses quiet spaces like a superpower. Those awkward quiet times are really beneficial for the storytelling.
Sometimes there's a misunderstanding about shortform narrative, like short documentaries and short films are small or a third of a feature doc or something like that. I actually think it's a totally different form. It would be like comparing a poem to an essay. This is my third short documentary and I found that the way in which you structure and contract time becomes really important.
We were telling this extremely high stakes, sweeping, all-consuming epic story in 36 minutes. So what I tried to do in the edit was contrast the condensed timeline, the linear timeline of essentially the last week of John's life leading up to his execution with moments within that timeline where the characters, particularly John and Aaron, sort of dip back into their memories and reflections and stretch time. So have long shots of thunder, long moments of silence.
The recorded message to Aaron from John at the end of the doc provides closure. Aaron throws up after listening. What happened in that moment?
There's a really interesting backstory about that message and how it came to be that isn't contained in the film. John had this decades-long desire to connect with Pablo Castro's family to express remorse. So I had asked Aaron over the months that we were talking, Have you ever thought about this? Would you ever want to talk to John? He always said no.
That door was shut. But the morning of John's execution, Aaron called me and said, “I do want to talk to him. I changed my mind.” At that point, it was too late because the way that it works on Texas death row is that the morning of the execution, the person is taken to the death chamber, and then there's no avenue anymore for them to communicate with, particularly the victims. But we were in a position to be able to communicate with John and record, as you saw in the film, his last phone calls.
I told Aaron we couldn’t facilitate this meeting anymore but is it okay if I tell John that you were open to it? I thought that would be really meaningful to him, particularly in his final hours. Aaron said that would be okay. So we told John that and [he said] “I want to just say a general message. Maybe you can record it and share it with him.”
I went back to Aaron a couple days later and told him I have this piece of audio. I can delete it. You can listen to it privately, or I can film you hearing this message. He said we can film. That's how that moment came to be.
John didn’t get to speak to Aaron directly, but he did get to say goodbye to his son.
It was absolutely crushing. That was another instance where we were in the room and it felt like we were in such a vulnerable, intimate, private moment. But we had spent some time with Israel, John's son, in the days prior, and he felt really comfortable with us. And in fact, I think he really wanted us to be there. He didn't want to be alone in that moment. John was happy to know that we were with him. We were trying to hold back tears. When that single tear fell from Israel's cheek, because he was like, he is 16 years old, he was trying to be a man. He's trying to keep it together. And when that single tear fell from his cheek, especially hearing John, we were just wet cheeks all around. We were sobbing. It was so difficult to hold it together in that moment.
Your father, Jag Mundhra, is a highly accomplished director. He wasn’t alive to see you get nominated for an Oscar. What film conversation would you have with him if he was still here?
Every day I think about things I wish I could ask my dad or things he could guide me on, but particularly in making this film, there were so many ethical questions that came up during making I Am Ready, Warden, in terms of making sure that I was portraying these two characters with empathy and respect, down to even mechanical questions. How much of the crime-scene footage is it okay to show without being gratuitous or retraumatizing people? So there were a lot of those kinds of questions, but really, my dad was in my head while I was cutting this film because he was such a profoundly loving, empathetic, and nonjudgmental person. And I think somewhere he taught me a lot about that, about as a storyteller, loving and having respect for all of your characters and treating your audience with respect. —Jermaine Hall
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Smriti Mundhra is also the creator of Netlfix's hit series Indian Matchmaking. Her new show, Muslim Matchmaking, premieres on Hulu Feb 11.
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