The award-winning Atlanta filmmaker survived a widowmaker heart attack and turned his emergency room camera into “Heartbeat,” a docuseries confronting the nation’s No. 1 killer.
Imagine being a vegetarian who runs 5 miles several times a week, and still nearly dying from a heart attack. That is not hypothetical. That is what happened to Ric Mathis, the Atlanta-based filmmaker and producer who has spent more than two decades training his lens on stories that demand to be told.
Only this time, the story found him first. Lying in an emergency room after surviving a widowmaker heart attack, one of the deadliest cardiac events a person can face, Mathis did not wait for someone else to tell it. He picked up a camera. What followed became Heartbeat, a docuseries that refuses to let the conversation stay quiet.
What made you decide to start filming Heartbeat?
The thing that made me decide to start filming is that I kept hearing the medical staff in the hospital say this is happening to younger and younger people. Younger people are showing up to the hospital with some form of heart disease, some form of heart failure, and not really making it out. So I said, if I make it out of this situation, which was very severe, the Widowmaker being a heart attack that kills 9 out of 10 people instantly, I’m going to make this film and spread the word about heart disease and getting those screenings and knowing the condition of your heart.
The series widens the lens beyond your personal story. Why was it important to make it about other people, too?
I just wanted to show the full spectrum of it. We have a 7-year-old that had open-heart surgery at just 7 days old. We have an 81-year-old, Les Brown, a world-renowned motivational speaker who is currently living with 6 stents in his heart. We have a 34-year-old that’s a mother of four that had heart failure after giving birth to her fourth child.
What I wanted to show is, it can affect you at all levels. As a newborn, as a 34-year-old, where you’re just going about your life and you think you’re healthy and everything is great, and of course in your 80s. Heart disease is the number one killer. It kills more people than cancer or any of those other conditions, but when you look at who’s getting the most publicity, the most attention, it’s typically cancer. But cancer isn’t the number one killer. Heart disease is.
What do you think people, especially in the Black community, are still getting wrong about the warning signs of Heartbeat’s core subject?
I think the thing that they’re getting wrong is that it appears with the Hollywood heart attack. The heart attack is what you see on Fred Sanford, where you grab your chest. But I never had chest pains when I experienced the Widowmaker. I run 5 miles two to three times a week. I’ve been vegetarian for over 27 years. I never experienced any of those things you typically associate with a heart attack or heart disease.
What I learned from producing this documentary is that it could be a cough. There’s one gentleman in the film that had a cough. It could be a pain behind your knee. The reason there is a pain behind your knee is because your calf muscles are your second heart. Your calf muscles help to pump blood back up to the heart, which allows your heart to work easier. That’s why doctors so often say the number one thing you need to do is walk or run.
Who do you think should watch Heartbeat?
I think people should watch Heartbeat as a family. There’s so much information in the film. There’s going to be something that you see, something that your sister sees, that your mother sees, your brother sees, that you can then have a conversation about after watching the film.
You’ve been using AI tools as part of how you tell the story. How does that technology help you communicate something this personal and serious?
One of the things about this film is I started recording the documentary the moment I walked into the emergency room. We have actual footage of the doctors, the cardiologists, the nurses, the nurse practitioners in real time, sound bites of them saying, wow, we don’t see how this happened to you, you are in great health. When you start documenting from that moment, you say, this is something that we need to talk about, because it’s not being talked about in our community as much as it should. In this film, I recreated a lot of those scenes using AI. I was able to recreate me and a lot of the other people featured in the film using AI.
What do you want viewers to do differently after watching?
After watching Heartbeat, just simply start counting your steps. 2,000 steps equals 1 mile. If you get 2,000 steps in a day, you’ve walked or run 1 mile. My goal is to get 10,000 steps a day, that’s 5 miles. Sometime I get it, sometime I don’t. But at the end of the week, I have more wins than losses, meaning I have 4 days where I’ve gotten those 10,000 steps out of seven. That’s success to me. Be mindful of your health, exercise more, walk, run. I like to run because I get that runner’s high. When you run, you just drift off and go into a whole different world.
Where can people find Heartbeat and follow you?
You can follow me at Ric Mathis. We have several screenings coming up, including one in D.C. We haven’t released the film yet, but we’re in talks with some distribution companies, so it’ll be on some digital platforms soon. I want to make sure I get the right platform.