By vividly challenging the true crime project’s claim to verity and certitude, Pushkar Mahabal’s Black White & Gray elegantly upends the filmmaking genre.
The six-episode Hindi series on Sony LIV has two parallel strands. Filmmaker Daniel Gray is pursuing a true crime documentary about a set of murders attributed to a young man. In the other strand, actors play characters associated with these killings. But like the fake found footage in the horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999), the documentary within Black, White & Gray is fiction, designed to demolish the notion of absolute truth.
The series seeks to remind viewers that a sensational crime may never give up its secrets. What we see and hear could be a feint rather than fact, which makes a final judgement difficult or even impossible.
The series stars Mayur More and Palak Jaiswal as characters known only as the Boy and the Girl. In the mock documentary segment, Sanjay Kumar Sahu plays the alleged killer, who pleads his innocence.
Mahabal worked in television before making his first feature, the acclaimed thriller Welcome Home, in 2020. The 40-year-old filmmaker spoke to Scroll about the ideas that went into Black, White & Gray and the slippery charms of true crime. Here are edited excerpts from the interview.
Black White & Gray appears to have come out of a deep interest in the true crime genre.
True crime has been an obsession. I have been obsessed with the Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys of the world. I have even memorised Jeffrey Dahmer’s interviews.
During the coronavirus pandemic, I watched the docuseries Don't F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer and Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. I wondered whether I had the skills to make such documentaries, since I am a fiction person. I felt, if I can’t make it, let me fake it.
You might be obsessed with true crime but you are not seduced by it. You are sceptical about the genre’s inherent gimmickiness.
As the title suggests, the show is trying to prove that there is no black and white to crime. The story of the show is as mysterious to me as it is to viewers. If it wasn’t this way, it wouldn’t be fun.
Like the character Sneha Meshram says in one of the episodes, we tend to see people as either simplistic heroes or villains. We don’t have the understanding, time or IQ to appreciate nuance. This is happening with general content too, which angers me. So I guess my frustration came out through the show.
What was your writing process like?
The show needed to look like the real thing, whether it’s the slightly cheesy music or the visual effects. But the show needed to be serious too.
The best thing I did was not to write the story first. Instead, I started writing the scenes and the dialogue. The script also had edit points – where the show would go into fiction or come back to the documentary.
During the post-production, several assistants thought that the staged documentary part was real. When Sanjay Kumar Sahu came in for the dubbing, they were startled to see him. They hadn’t been told that he is an actor. We kept playing along until we reached the fifth episode.
The fictional story of the couple is not filmy, it is straightforward. But in the mockumentary, you don’t trust anyone by the end of the season. That’s the thing about unreliable narrators – you don’t know who’s lying or who’s telling you the truth.
There are two styles at work. There is the gritty documentary aesthetic, and a more fluid kind of storytelling centred on the Girl and the Boy.
There is a clear distinction between the two styles. The show jumps back and forth between the two strands, so you know what you are watching. We didn’t merge the two worlds at any point, otherwise it would have come off as a gimmick, a kind of false complexity.
We shot the series in roughly 46 days, with a small crew. The non-fiction bits took less time to shoot. For instance, although Sanjay is in the show throughout, he shot for only two-three days.
Cinematographer Saee Bhope has completely designed the different shooting styles. She shot the interviews on small cameras and degraded them to create authenticity, the way Daniel Gray would have done.
There are also two different acting styles. The largely neutral performances in the mock documentary are more convincing and powerful than the parallel strand.
The mock documentary portions were extremely challenging. How do you get an actor to perform in a non-actor way? An actor will give himself away, however realistic the performance.
It was especially tough for Sanjay and Isha Mate, who plays Sneha. We tried out all variations of the dialogue. The most important thing was that Sanjay didn’t know the script or how his character would turn out. If he knew, it would have shown in his performance.
I wrote his dialogue in English. Just before the take, he would read his lines and translate them while the camera was on so that I could get the mumbles, the realistic pauses, the self-correction.
The guy who plays the real Rao isn’t a trained actor, so it was okay for him. Now I am getting calls about Vinod Wanikar, asking who he is, how is he so natural.
Sanjay is mostly dead-eyed and unemotional, like people in true crime documentaries.
Sanjay and I watched a lot of documentaries. I remember a documentary about the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai in which a cop said that his superior was shot dead before his eyes. He said this in a flat way that was still emotional and authentic. The man wasn’t acting, he was trying his best not to be emotional. That’s what Sanjay did too.
One of the most memorable characters is the police officer Bobade – and his pet dog.
Bobade is played by Chetan Mhaske, a brilliant Marathi theatre actor. There is a moment when Bobade gets angry and the dog barks. The moment doesn’t look designed but it was.
Why do we never see Daniel Gray’s face?
It adds to the realism. It’s me saying that if you want to make a documentary like this in real life, you have to remain hidden. It’s me being scared of exposing the main thread, which is Daniel Gray.
This is also why I haven’t named the characters played by Mayur More and Palak Jaiswal. It creates a sense of mystery or even confusion.
I didn’t want to create unnecessary conversations around class or caste or religion. The simple point is that the characters come from two groups that do not get along. As Rao says, the father’s main problem is that his daughter is in love with a man she isn’t allowed to be with.
Viewers can project their own political readings onto the show. I have tried to represent all sides, I have tried not be biased. But yes, the show is political. All content is political. Even romantic films are political.
How did you get into filmmaking?
I am from Nagpur. I am a trained Hindustani classical music vocalist. I came to Mumbai in 2006 to become a music director. I did a few projects, including a couple of Marathi films.
In 2011, I made a short film out of curiosity with my writer and actor friends. Somehow, the trailer reached Ram Gopal Varma. I was over the moon since I am a huge Ram Gopal Varma fan.
He was very impressed to know that I had learnt filmmaking through YouTube. We made a film together in 2011, a thriller called Jungle 2, which was completed but never released.
I wanted to continue as a director. I worked in television for six years. I was earning well. But one day, I was hanging out with my old friends from Nagpur, Saee Bhope and Ankita Narang. We were ranting that nobody appreciated our talent. Then we thought, why not make something on our own?
Welcome Home was a trust-based film. We called up all our friends and said, let’s make something, never mind whether it sells or not. Producers Hemal Thakkar and Paresh Rawal saw it, Sony LIV saw it, and they liked it.
I am very relaxed when Saee and Ankita are on the sets. Since we wanted to do something else with Sony LIV, I wrote Black White & Gray. Saee shot the show, as she did Welcome Home, and Ankita, who wrote and produced Welcome Home, is the creative producer on the show.
How have viewers reacted to Black White & Gray?
Filmmakers have been asking me how I pulled off such an experimental show in a corporate set-up. On that front, I have had a very good experience with the people at Sony LIV. They didn’t interfere and let me do my thing.
We had pre-written the show when we pitched it to Sony LIV. Such a complex narrative can’t be pitched as an idea. You need to have episodes ready so that you can explain the treatment, otherwise it can be confusing. I couldn’t even explain the show to my father. I told him to watch the episodes instead.
Mounting a show like this is tiring since there is no template, no reference, but it’s hugely enjoyable too.
Also read:
‘Black White & Gray’ review: A gripping dissection of the true crime genre
‘Welcome Home’ review: Two census takers ring the wrong doorbell
