At a certain point about halfway into “I Am Ready, Warden,” Jan Trujillo, a retired school teacher and a member of the Second Baptist Church in Texas, recalls what she asked herself when she was set up to meet with John Henry Ramirez while he was on death row, there to provide comfort if not necessarily compassion when she like the majority of her state believed that the death penalty was a rightful punishment for taking someone else’s life. “What do I say to somebody who stabbed someone 29 times?” Trujillo remembers, before sifting through a stack of poetry that Ramirez ultimately sent to her after the two struck up a friendship, taken aback by not only how soulful he was, but how easy he was to talk to when being aware of the murder that landed him in prison over a decade earlier, the merciless killing of a convenience store cashier named Pablo Castro in a failed robbery attempt.
Smriti Mundhra wasn’t looking to exonerate Ramirez when she traveled down to Livingston where Ramirez was facing his final days ahead of his execution in the fall of 2022 when the case against him had never been contested, but what the filmmaker does want to reconsider is what capitol punishment actually achieves when the controversy surrounding the issue tends to obscure the people most directly affected by it. Inviting audiences to know Ramirez as well as Aaron Castro, the now-adult son of Pablo, as they work through their own ambivalence about the fate that Ramirez is about to meet, Mundhra finds them to have evolved with time, shaped in their own ways by the difficult circumstances in which they were raised and far from being the people you’d expect them to be.
Mundhra has had a habit of shaking up people’s perceptions from her previous shorts “St. Louis Superman” (co-directed with Sami Khan) and “Shelter” to her Netflix series “Indian Matchmaking,” looking past how societal norms have been set up to ask why and “I Am Ready, Warden” is perhaps her most disarming to date, looking on as Ramirez is resigned to his death sentence despite the potential for an appeal yet appearing as if he’s what the system was ideally set up to achieve as he expresses remorse for his crimes and has actively taken steps away from the 19-year-old that murdered someone and attempted to run from it. Then there is Castro, who lost his father at 14 and finds it harder to move on, though his natural instincts lead him away from believing that the loss of another life will make up for it, unaware of any progress Ramirez has made when the two have kept their distance.
“I Am Ready, Warden” is aimed at bringing people closer together, Castro and Ramirez included and the powerful 37-minute doc is a prime contender for a Best Documentary Short Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. With its recent debut on Paramount+ after playing such festivals as Big Sky, Hot Springs and DOC NYC, Mundhra generously spoke of the 18-month gestation period to bring the story to the screen with such sensitivity, avoiding the usual framework for how filmmakers generally tackle the death penalty and ultimately becoming a bridge for her subjects to have a deeper understanding of one another and ultimately extending that to audiences.
How’d you get interested in all this?
I’m always interested in exploring big existential questions about the society we live in, particularly around big institutions that [the masses] essentially benefit from the protection of, but maybe leave some others behind. This is my third in a series of shorts that explores these themes. The first, “St. Louis Superman” was about the impact of gun violence and activism. The second, “Shelter” was about the housing crisis in Southern California, and this one’s about capital punishment. I’m a forty-something woman who lives in a lovely suburb of Los Angeles and these are issues that, God willing, will never touch me directly, but [only] because I’m afforded a lot of protection by our society. But for that reason, I felt compelled to explore from the perspective of those who don’t have that kind of protection.
I think capital punishment is one of the big moral questions of our society and I had been working on a different project that took place on Texas Death Row, a miniseries that didn’t end up moving forward. But everything I had learned about Texas Death Row and some of the moral and ethical complications of capital punishment, I was really interested in the topic. And throughout my research, one writer whose work kept popping up was Keri Blakinger, a reporter at the time for the Marshall Project who covered the Texas criminal justice system. She’s a formerly incarcerated person and her writing, particularly about the men on death row was really, really beautiful, so I reached out and said, I would love to make something that takes a look at capital punishment but not an innocence case.
I specifically didn’t want to do that because I feel sometimes that veers more into an issue-based or true crime film. I don’t believe in capital punishment. But if we are doing this in the majority of the states in this country, especially in Texas, which for a time was the number one state for executions, we have an imperative to explore it from all angles, and the main thing was, does [the health penalty] do what it says it’s going to do? Does it give victims a sense of justice and a sense of closure? I really wanted to make something on somebody who admitted that they killed somebody and make a film that really tested our capacity for forgiveness and a person’s capacity for redemption.
It’s so effective because it takes a different approach. How do you even prep for a film like this?
It was a really tough film to make for a number of reasons. One is that access to Texas death row is extremely limited. We could really only film with John in the frame that you saw, [where] he’s in that glass box in the visitation room, and we were able to film with him a limited number of times. There’s a lot of hoops to climb through in order to get that access, and we were lucky to get that access and that’s also why my partner, the producer of the film, Keri Blakinger, was so instrumental because she had written about John before and she had a much deeper relationship with him than I could have gotten in those weeks leading up to his execution. There was an inherent trust there because she was part of the process.
Then one of the biggest challenges was really telling John’s story because the sad reality is he’s largely been not only abandoned by society, but also by his family, so there aren’t a lot of photos of him or material to construct visually a full picture of his life. We had to find creative ways to tell a multidimensional story of who he was and what brought him to that moment, the night he killed Pablo. After many months, we were very lucky to get Aaron [Castro] to participate in the film, and that just added a whole other dimension to the film and another side that helped also flesh out John’s story, but gave us just more to hang a film off of.
There’s a lot of mirroring in the film where John is trapped, and he has only his thoughts [since] he is in solitary confinement at least 23 hours a day, if not 24 hours a day. Very few people really understand what he went through and his mindset, but Aaron, being out in the free world actually suffered a lot of the same things. He felt very isolated, like he didn’t have a safe place to express [himself], and what really struck me about meeting Aaron was that there’s this tension right beneath the surface, [this] instinct towards forgiveness and a need for justice, and those are always fighting with each other. In a way, I think he was also trapped with his own thoughts, even though he was technically free, but also very burdened and trapped by this one event, so those two stories could really speak to each other and mirror each other.
You really feel that isolation, which puts you in an interesting position as a kind of intermediary. What was that like?
It was very tricky because the one thing when you make any film, you want your protagonists to feel safe with you and this was a particular challenge with this film because we had two protagonists in this film [where] at least Aaron hated John, obviously, so the way that we approached that relationship was just to be very transparent with Aaron. He knew from the very beginning we were filming with John and we were going to try to tell his story, but I also told him very clearly that I’m not making an aggressively anti-death penalty film. I’m here to learn, I’m here to listen, I’m here to get all perspectives and then let that lead me to wherever it leads me. The goal is not to have a heavy hand here to make you look like, you know, a bloodthirsty person who’s rooting for an execution, nor is it to make John look like an evil killer who’s callous. I’m just following the truth. And I think Aaron really respected that and appreciated the time that went into making the film.
But we were quite literally an intermediary between these two men in the film because one of John’s big wishes throughout his life since the time that he was put on death row was to communicate to the family of the man he killed that he didn’t take that life callously. Maybe the action in the moment was callous, but [he knew] the impact of what he did and he says very clearly in the film that he would never ask for forgiveness, [because that] felt to him inappropriate, but he wanted to communicate to the family that he understood the gravity of what he did. The way that the Texas criminal justice system works is that a prisoner is not allowed to reach out directly to their victims or to their family. It’s incumbent on the family to initiate contact with a prisoner if they choose, and understandably so, the Castro family never wanted this. But we were filming with Aaron on the day of the execution and before we started rolling cameras, we were just with him and I think when he realized the execution was actually going to go through, he said, “I want to talk to him.”
At that point, John had already been transported to the death chamber, so it was too late, you know, for them to have that conversation, but because Aaron had told me that, and we were also able to talk to John on that day, he was allowed to make phone calls right up until the execution time, so we were able to tell him that, “Look, Aaron did finally say he wanted to talk to you, but unfortunately, because of the rules, that conversation is impossible now.” That’s when John decided to record that message for Aaron. He didn’t want to cross that line and overstep if the family didn’t make any kind of initiation to reach out to him, but once that door opened, he said, “The last thing I say, can you record this message? And if you feel it’s appropriate, share it with Aaron.” So he recorded that message, and then after his execution, I talked to Aaron off-camera and said, “Listen, you wanted to have a conversation with him that wasn’t possible because of the timing. However, I was able to communicate that with John. He recorded something. Do you want to hear it?” And I gave him the option of listening to it privately, and at that point because we had such a level of comfort with each other, he said, “It’s fine, you can film me listening to it.” So in that last moment, as filmmakers, we were a conduit between these two men.
That sensitivity that allowed for that moment is clear in how you present this to audience. What was it like to structure this in a way where it could disarm so readily what people usually bring into a subject such as this?
That’s where a lot of that 18 months of working on this film came in. We spent six months filming and prepping and that overlapped a little bit with an 18-month edit period and it was really challenging. We knew there was an overall structure, [with] an arc towards the execution, but while we were filming, we didn’t know whether that execution was even going to happen because there was an effort to stop the execution. We also didn’t know for a long time if Aaron was gonna be willing to film with us. So it was true verite in that sense, where we were just trying to be there as much as possible, and give space to allow things to just happen.
Then in the edit, we knew at that point John was executed, but one thing that was really interesting weaving [together] John’s story and Aaron’s story and telling the story over time is that the night of the murder was a flashpoint in both of their lives, but then there was the almost 20 years after that. In that time, both men changed dramatically. They went from 19 years old [in John’s case] and 14 [in Aaron’s] into adults, and John spent 18 of those years on death row, in isolation with time to think about his actions and reflect. He had a son, and he had time to think about who he was as a person. And Aaron grew up to be a man who in one sense had to live with the fact that his entire life had to be defined by this incident, but then processing those feelings about who he is as a person versus what he’s been conditioned to want. To try to weave that story through time was really challenging, and it took a lot of work, but I think we were able to find a way where you get the sense of the evolution of both of these men’s thoughts and things that impacted them over that time, but also a sense of how long each of these two have lived with the consequences of that night.
What has this been like to bring out into the world so far?
It’s honestly been an incredible journey. Every frame, every line of audio, every B-roll shot, every scene, every moment was carefully considered and labored over to the point where we would lock the film and deliver it, and then I would take it back and say, “No, I need to change it again.” I think a lot of short documentaries are there to sort of explore an issue in a way that people can champion a protagonist or an issue, and this film is a difficult one [for that]. It’s a very introspective film, and those can be tougher to reach people. So the fact that the film has reached so many has been incredibly moving. Every screening we have, there’s tears, and I’ll give you one anecdote that I think I’ll never forget for as long as I live.
We had a screening at DOC NYC, and this man came up to me after who had nothing to do with the film industry. He heard about the film and he came to the screening and he had spent 16 years on death row for whatever circumstances and he was able to get out. He spoke to me and also got a chance to speak with Aaron, who was at that screening, and he talked to me about how accurately he felt that that passage of time was conveyed in the film through John, and how much that’s how he felt when he was on death row. He had killed somebody — it wasn’t a mistake [that he was there] or an innocence case, and he told this to Aaron, which I thought was really powerful and he really appreciated that. [This person’s] a changed person now, and now he not only lives for himself, but he said he feels a duty to live his life with purpose and dignity and integrity, and love and compassion, because he’s also living for his victim. He said with tears in his eyes that his victim’s name is the last name he’s going to say before he dies because that person changed his life, and like exactly what John said, it made him a better person.
I just hope people find this film and I hope it changes their hearts and their minds, and gives them a more full perspective about capital punishment. We’re one of the few, if not only, first-world, industrialized countries to still have capital punishment, and as a society, we really need to think about if this is something that we feel is morally correct. I’m not here to cast judgment one way or another, but I think that it’s something that we need to think about more fully and that man speaking about how accurately the film conveyed what it’s like to be on death row, and then Aaron talking about how much he felt the film accurately conveyed his point of view, that to me is the most gratifying thing I could have ever experienced.
“I Am Ready, Warden” is now streaming on Paramount+.