Chasing an idea

Filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane talks Black Warrant, the only OTT show set in Delhi’s Tihar jail, and his creative collaboration with his co-creator Satyanshu Singh after 15 years.
(L to R) Rahul Bhat as Dsp Rajesh Tomar, Zahan Kapoor as Sunil Kumar Gupta in Black Warrant. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
(L to R) Rahul Bhat as Dsp Rajesh Tomar, Zahan Kapoor as Sunil Kumar Gupta in Black Warrant. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
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4 min read

Do peacocks visit Tihar? In the prison-drama series Black Warrant, the central jail might be slithering with both literal and metaphorical snakes but the peafowl becomes the symbol of hope. “Birds don’t chirp there,” says creator Satyanshu Singh, reminiscing the time when he, along with showrunner and co-creator Vikramaditya Motwane, had visited Tihar prison for research. “For some reason, they know this is not the right place,” he adds. “But surprisingly, during our visit, we saw a peacock. It sat for thirty seconds and then flew away. That’s when we knew we had to keep them in the show.”

The Netflix series, based on the book Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer by journalist Sunetra Choudhury and former jail superintendent Sunil Gupta, stars Zahan Kapoor as the latter, young, wet-behind-the-ears jailer learning the ropes of Asia’s biggest prison. He is bossed around by the calculative DSP Rajesh Tomar (Rahul Bhat) and has a live-wire Haryanvi Dahiya (Anurag Thakur) and a pacifying Punjabi Mangat (Paramvir Singh Cheema) as colleagues.

Vikramaditya Motwane
Vikramaditya Motwane

“Everybody in Tihar, be it the prisoners or the jail staff, was a character straight out of a film,” says Motwane. “There was a muscular senior police official in a well-fitted uniform, a DSP who was in charge of the kitchen was a big film buff.” Satyanshu adds, “And that too of world cinema. He was quoting (Akira) Kurosawa!”

A jail setting

Black Warrant is ostensibly the only show in India set almost completely inside a prison. Motwane says that for visual inspiration he only had western films and TV series like The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Mindhunter (2017-19). “There is a certain cinematic way in which the American and European jails are shown, we don’t have their counterparts in India,” he says.

“Tihar doesn’t have those dim-lit corridors like they show in American dramas. It’s more open and has gardens. It’s actually quite peaceful.” Talking about their vision for the series, the makers say that more than knowing what to do, they were concerned about where not to go. “It was a big responsibility. We knew we were making the definitive prison show for India,” says Satyanshu. “What we didn’t want to do was a depressing, grim, political commentary. We wanted to show character journeys and not have a voyeuristic but an empathic gaze.”

Motwane credits Satyanshu for having everything mapped out. “This time, I finally experienced what being a showrunner feels like. Whenever anybody used to come and ask me little details like how a cop should wear his cap or how many stars should be on his shoulder, I just redirected them towards Satyanshu,” says Motwane. “It actually became a running joke, where we said that Satyanshu was the set’s Sunil Gupta.”

Motwane and Satyanshu go way back. The latter started his film journey by penning the poems written by the young protagonist in Motwane’s debut feature Udaan (2010). Satyanshu, also a known screenwriting teacher, then went on to direct a children’s film called Chintu Ka Birthday (2019) for whose script he says Motwane was “the biggest champion.” In an Instagram post,

Satyanshu spoke about how, years after Udaan, he was approached by Motwane to collaborate on the series. “May 26, 2020: @motwayne calls me. ‘I’m sending you a book. Read it and we’ll talk,’ he wrote. “I felt Satyanshu was the person who would dig deep into something like this,” says Motwane. “He loves research. If I tell him to read one book, I know he will devour five others.”

Satyanshu Singh
Satyanshu Singh

Other collaborators

Motwane and Satyanshu might be the captains steering the ship, but there were other sailors on board too. Directors Rohin Nair, Arkesh Ajay, and Ambiecka Pandit helmed specific episodes. “They had to look seamless,” says Rohin, who has worked with Motwane before on Bhavesh Joshi Superhero (2018) and AK vs AK (2020). “For me, it will be the biggest compliment if the episode directed by me blends in.

But, if not for the audience, I know which parts of the episode were purely me.” Ajay adds that although Motwane was on sets every day he didn’t meddle with their process. “We had full freedom. He never sat down with us to dictate what needs to be done,” he says. Ambiecka goes on to add, “Motwane actually started his work before the shoot. He gave each one of us episodes that we were suited to direct.”

Motwane is a true versatile artist. Unlike his counterparts like Anurag Kashyap, Imtiaz Ali, and Dibakar Banerjee, he can’t be stamped with the badge of a certain kind of cinema. Following his debut with Udaan (2010), he created a period romance (Lootera, 2013), a survival-thriller (Trapped, 2017), and a vigilante-actioner (Bhavesh Joshi Superhero, 2018).

On OTT, he helmed the gangster-saga Sacred Games (2018-19), comedy-thriller AK vs AK (2020), tinsel town drama Jubilee (2023), and recently the screenlife-thriller CTRL (2024). “People, however, have told me that the running theme in my filmography is trapped characters trying to find their salvation,” says Motwane. “I don’t know about that. What excites me is a new idea, a new story, taking it and building it up from scratch. It is the excitement of the chase.”

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