‘Black, White & Gray’ director Pushkar Mahabal: There is dearth of good thrillers in India

Director Pushkar Mahabal doesn’t hold back as he unpacks the making of ‘Black, White & Gray – Love Kills’, and takes us deep into the uncharted territory of creating a serious mockumentary-style thriller.

From drawing inspiration during the lockdown to crafting a genre-bending narrative with no reference point, Mahabal opened up about the risks, challenges, and long creative journey behind the Sony LIV original. While reflecting on the making of the show, he also got candid about a larger issue plaguing the industry—why most Indian thrillers fail to resonate.

“There is a dearth of good thrillers in India,” he stated, urging creators to root their stories in cultural reality instead of mimicking Western templates. Read excerpts from his conversation with Mathrubhumi English:

How did you come up with the idea of creating a mockumentary?

I personally love watching documentaries. During the COVID-19 lockdown, I watched a lot of documentaries on various platforms. I asked myself if I could make a documentary myself, but since it’s not my skill set and I love watching it, why not create a mockumentary? I had seen some mockumentaries in the past, but they were rather in a funny tone. So, I thought, why not make it a serious one?

What went behind the making of ‘Black, White & Gray - Love Kills’?

The biggest challenge was in its craft because we had no reference point. For instance, how to edit ‘Black, White & Gray - Love Kills’, we had nothing similar to refer to that may have helped us with how to edit it. There is no such show like this. It was all a trial-and-error process. We had to figure it out ourselves on how to showcase this genre. Even telling our actors about what we were making was a bit of a task. Once you tell an actor that every character is being played by two people, it gets confusing for them to understand at first go. It gets more confusing when you tell them further that one actor will play the real guy while the other will play the fictional character.

Another challenge was to shoot the interviews, and to get trained actors who play the characters that in a way they don’t look like actors but real-life characters. The confusion that people might think is a real-life mockumentary is what helps the genre.

To make something look real while it's not is very challenging. Even the footage of the interview had to be shown like it were shot by one guy.

Are there any shows that inspired you to make content like this?

There are precisely two shows that I watched within a week that made me feel ike I have to create something similar. ‘Don’t F**ck With The Cats’ and ‘Night Stalkers’. Both are documentaries available on Netflix. When I watched these two, I knew I wanted to do something in this genre. And that’s how I came up with this fake documentary thing. I basically realized that I don’t have the patience for a documentary, so let me fake it.

Now that ‘Black, White & Gray - Love Kills’ is out in the world, what goes through your mind when you look back at the process?

It took a lot of time to make it. It’s a journey of three to three and a half years in making. Write from the time I started writing it to directing it, all of us were trying to figure it out during the process. I wrote it for almost a year, then shot it, and then edited it. I got so saturated during these years that by the end of it, I didn’t know what was happening. But I was surrounded by the right kind of people is why I was able to do it.

Dark thrillers and escape dramas are my favourite genres; I’m far away from rom-coms. In fact, the next one that I'm already working on is an extremely dark thriller.

Independent cinema in India doesn’t get the same kind of recognition or promotion compared to commercial cinema. Your thoughts?

I see a bright future for independent cinema in India. I think that it’s just the filmmakers who are supposed to realize the mathematics behind it. Even if you want to make an Indie film, you have to remember that someone is investing their money in your craft, and you should earn some money for them, and then do what you want to. The problem we have with our industry today is that people are making indie films with the budget of a mainstream cinema. It can’t work like that. It has to be simply made for the producers to be able to afford it. I think it will happen in the next few years because OTT is not going to work if it keeps working like this. Indie is the only way going to be left for everyone else.

How is the thriller space in India?

Thrillers will work in India when we start making stories that are rooted in our traditions and culture. For instance, in Southern India, when we show an investigator, we will show him wearing an overcoat. Who will wear an overcoat in India’s summer? We don’t try to root the stories. ‘Welcome Home’ (Pushkar’s debut directorial) was an extremely formulaic film. It’s based on an old American formula where few people go out somewhere and they get stuck. But if we show that two women went out for camping and then got stuck, it’s not an Indian thing. Nobody goes camping in India. I think people liked ‘Welcome Home’ because the two females had gone for the population census and then got stuck somewhere. People found that to be very Indian. All the comments I read about the film were that they had seen such films outside India, but for the first time in India. There is a dearth of good thrillers in India.