Did He Do It? All Your 'Black White & Gray - Love Kills' Questions Answered By The Show's Creator

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say we haven't seen anything quite like SonyLIV’s Black, White & Gray - Love Kills come out of Hindi cinema. Created by Pushkar Sunil Mahabal and Hemal A. Thakkar, the dazzlingly inventive "true crime" thriller is a triumph of form, plotting, and subtext.  

The narrative, which follows a series of murders that took place in Nagpur in 2020, jumps between talking heads recounting details of the case (the documentary half) and the dramatic recreation of events featuring known actors (the drama half). Except it soon becomes apparent that this is all staged. There was no such case. The talking heads are also actors. It’s all fiction.  

Over six deliciously bingeable episodes, writer-director-editor Pushkar Sunil Mahabal (Welcome Home) gloriously uses the language and packaging of a true-crime docu-series to mount a compelling murder-mystery and interrogates our willingness to blindly submit to well-packaged media narratives. The thrill of watching the show comes from not only following the investigation, but also investigating the show itself and trying to figure out what is true and what isn’t.  

“I figured that at some point you will realise it's not all real. But I tried to maintain that illusion for as long as possible. The longer the audience buys into this and believes it, the more fun it’ll be,” Mahabal tells The Hollywood Reporter India. “There are some people who have watched all six episodes and still haven’t realised it’s all fake," he adds.

In terms of how the two halves of the show contradict and inform each other, he says, "Every edit point, cliffhanger, and transition from fiction to nonfiction was written into the script; nothing was figured out in the edit."

Following the release of the show, in a spoiler-filled conversation, Mahabal breaks down that shocking ending, all the unanswered questions, playing with multiple false narrators, how he extracted such fine "documentary" performances and more.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Warning: spoilers ahead for Black, White & Gray.  

I have to start with the dazzling, inventive form. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Where did this idea come from? Did you have any references?

I love watching serial killer documentaries and investigative crime shows. During the pandemic, I was watching a lot of them, like Don't F**K with Cats and Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. I knew I didn’t have the skill to make a documentary, but I could make fiction. That’s when I thought “let me fake a documentary”. It was as basic as that. I made the documentary I wanted to watch. And it took a lot of experimentation and trial and error because there was no reference point. I hadn’t seen a “mockumentary” like this in India.

We have to talk about that ending. What to make of those final minutes and why you were focusing on the wall behind The Boy? The fact that we see The Girl’s red top on the floor, for me, meant one of two things; either she’s still alive, or he did kill her and kept it as some sort of souvenir...

The fun of that lies in not discussing it (laughs). Or at least I shouldn’t. I should let you guys come to your own conclusions. But everything is by design. To stay on that empty wall and the way he comes back and sits down and sees her undergarment there is all by design. The truth is, as a writer, even I don't know. I have not written it or even told myself what happened, and I am enjoying that confusion within myself. I like the mystery that Daniel Gray just has that one shot and even he doesn't know what really happened.

I've never even thought about giving it an ending in my head. That's the idea behind the whole show. If I gave it an ending, I’d lose the point I wanted to make. The format of the show is the statement I want to make. The medium is the message. But yes, those are the two options that came to me (that he killed her or that she’s still alive).  

What went into finding the visual language of the drama half and the docu half and making them feel distinctive? With the drama half there were times when the craft felt intentionally overexcited and loud, almost like an episode of CID or Crime Patrol. And with the docu half, I loved the way you used CCTV and social media footage to maintain the illusion that this could all be real.

Most of that credit goes to my DOP Saee Bhope. She figured out that for the documentary portions and the interviews; we used a tripod and a very small camera to make it look like a one-man shoot because Daniel Gray would probably be shooting these by himself. That’s why sometimes in the frame you can see the head of the boom microphone, and you can hear ruffles in the audio. We even lit it in a way that it looks unfinished, like the person doesn’t care about the aesthetics of the shot.

The CCTV clips we shot on extremely old cameras to get that rawness, because you can't do it in post. No matter how much you try, people consume so much content these days, they’d instantly be able to tell it’s fake. For the drama half, we used a different camera, and we made it feel loud on purpose. Even the performances and certain shots were slightly over-the-top and slightly filmy, almost like it’s somebody's imagination playing out. 

In trying to comment on the true crime genre and our obsession with it, you’ve also crafted an incredibly absorbing, compelling murder mystery over six episodes and how one “murder” escalates to multiple deaths. What went into designing the plot?  Was any of this based on a real case?

It's all absolutely fiction. It's not even loosely based on anything real. I had written this story long before I wrote this show. It’s a story I'd heard from someone about a guy who goes to Goa with his girlfriend; she hits her head and passes out and he thinks she’s dead, but five minutes later she’s fine. I thought this could be a great plot for a dark comedy film — a guy with a dead body in the boot, desperately trying to dispose of it. But when I decided to make this “mockumentary”, that’s when I went back to that story... but not as a comedy. I started writing with no structure in mind. I just wrote the first episode and then the second and figured things out on the way. 

One of the things I loved about the plot is how much you're able to get away with because of the form. The story ranges from plausible to unlikely to straight-up bizarre with The Girl “coming back to life”. But it works because this could all be The Boy’s imagination.

When you think about it from that angle, it makes you reconsider the end when Rao (Deven Bhojani/Vinod Wanikar) is being interviewed, and he says “I was sent to kill two people, but I didn’t actually kill either of them”. If you now take the option that The Boy was lying, then it’s possible that the only character who was actually telling the truth was Rao.

The idea that you don't trust the narrator just makes you nervous while watching the dramatic recreations. What if he's lying? What if Daniel Gray is biased? What if this is all a lie? And on top of that, you know that the whole show is a lie. We used to joke about how the only characters that are “white” in the show are Sunny the driver, and the old man in the village. Apart from them, everyone had their own motives. You don't trust anyone.  

You have known faces like Mayur More, Palak Jaiswal and Tigmanshu Dhulia for the drama half and these lesser-known faces for the docu half. What was the casting process like and what went into extracting those excellent “naturalistic” performances?

For the documentary half, I knew I couldn’t afford to have anyone who’s recognisable or has done any major work before this. But it took me some time to figure out which characters needed trained actors and where I needed non-actors. For The Real Boy, I knew I needed an extremely trained actor and someone recommended Sanjay (Kumar Sahu)’s name.

And then Shubham and Trishaan came on board as casting directors and through them I found Isha Mate (The Girl’s best friend). Vinod Wanikar (who plays The Real Rao) was an absolute non-actor, he’d never acted before.

During the shoot, I never gave any dialogue to the non-fiction actors. I wrote all the dialogue in English and gave it to them literally seconds before the shoot and asked them to translate it to Hindi within the take. I wanted those fumbles, mumbles and thinking pauses. I would ask them to say a line 20 times and keep rehearsing it, and I’d signal my DOP to keep the camera rolling and the actors would just tire out and say the lines mechanically, or in a very bizarre tone and I would find my take in that. A lot of people still don’t realise these are actually actors.

I never even narrated the whole story or what happens in the end to Sanjay. I just told him his character’s version of what he’d been through, because I wanted him to do it with complete honesty. While we were shooting that last scene, I told him about the wall and the undergarment and he was shocked and asked, "Did he really kill the girl?!”. I said I didn’t know, and told him to come to his own conclusion, but not to tell me.  

Let’s talk about the politics of the show. For starters, you never name The Boy or The Girl, but it’s implied that he belongs to a different caste or religion and that’s partly why he’s being hunted. 

I didn’t name them because I guess it's my way of talking about the things I wanted to talk about without being obvious. It could be caste, class or religion-based. The point is we live in a society where a particular section of people is not liked by a particular section of people.

The essence of the show, for me, was to condemn us for how easily we submit to flashy, well-packaged narratives and the news in particular. Is that fair?

Yeah. And I think that's just my personality reflecting in the show. I am a very cynical person. My favourite moment is when Daniel Gray asks Isha Mate (The Girl’s best friend) if she’s given up on society and she says, "Yeah I have". I just relate to that character.

Every character has their own agenda and nobody has any empathy for anyone else. Even that “good” journalist who The Boy thinks will support him turns out to be corrupt. That was me saying that I believe the system will always win. Even the popular content we watch today. People don't want to get into nuance these days. They want a clear hero or villain. That’s what we’ve become. 

In terms of where the show goes from here, if there is a second season would it be a continuation of this case, or Daniel Gray looking at a new case?

It’ll be Daniel Gray working on a new story. There's also the possibility that Daniel Gray also becomes a part of the story.