CIFF 2025 | Black Warrant team on creating a banger series & the showrunner model

At a recent industry talk at Cinevesture International Film Festival in Chandigarh, Applause Entertainment CEO Sameer Nair spoke about “a renewed interest in all things authentic” when it comes to what's working for the streamers. The Applause model is what is working. And in that, a safe bet is a book-to-screen adaptation. Hansal Mehta's Scam 92 to Vikramaditya Motwane's recent series Black Warrant are successful examples of that strategy.

“Doing a book adaptation or any material which is written is a good starting point because there’s some source material to go with as compared to having something written originally which you then need to figure out whether you wish to do it or not. It’s useful. We do book adaptations, international show adaptations. News articles which you can buy rights to and build that into a larger series. Source material is everywhere. Scam 92 is a book,” said Nair, Black Warrant producer, “People want to hear real stories, a real-life story, be told that these are real stories. And they want to believe the telling that we do, this is how it happened, which may probably not be.”

Director Vikramaditya Motwane added about book-to-screen stories, “Coincidentally enough, the two series we adapted for Netflix have been from books: Sacred Games and Black Warrant. And they both had distinctly different approaches to how one takes that source material and adapts it.”

Motwane said the Indian streaming space must adopt the showrunner-director model where duties are divided between different professionals to ensure an efficient way of working.

Motwane most recently served as creator-showrunner and a co-director on the acclaimed Netflix series "Black Warrant", which is a dramatised adaptation of the book “Black Warrant: Confessions Of A Tihar Jailer” by Sunil Gupta, a former superintendent of Tihar, and journalist Sunetra Choudhury. For the show, Motwane said he adopted a "fly on the wall" approach to show the world that exist within the walls of Tihar jail. That was also his cue for his cast and crew.

(From right) Producer & Applause Entertainment CEO Sameer Nair, Vikramaditya Motwane, Zahan Kapoor and Rahul Bhat at a panel at Cinevesture International Film Festival, Chandigarh.

"The showrunner-director model is something we must adopt in the series (format). It is much easier... It's an efficient way of working...," he said, "We are not sort of stuck in saying that I am directing every single minute of this 51 days of shoot."

At the session titled 'Synergy of Success', Motwane said being a showrunner allows one to have a distance from the project. "As a showrunner, you can detach a little bit but it is important for me to make sure that my character arcs are being served the way they were set in the beginning," he added. A showrunner is a person who oversees the writing and production of each episode of a series and has ultimate managerial and creative control over it. They may or may not be a director or co-director on the show.

Previously, Motwane served as showrunner on the two seasons of "Sacred Games", another Netflix series, of which he directed the first season with Anurag Kashyap. Season two was directed by Kashyap and Neeraj Ghaywan.

Motwane said the showrunner-director model works around the world and has been effective with stories that span multiple seasons. "We tried it in 'Black Warrant', we attempted to do it a little bit in 'Sacred Games', like what if we got four directors (but we) realised that it's a scheduling nightmare. Just trying to figure out how we go with multiple directors from world A to world B and then decide that, 'Okay, let me just direct one half of the show, Anurag directs one half of the show, we put it together'.

"But that ('Sacred Games') was like almost doing two independent feature films. There was a model in 'Black Warrant' because we were mostly shooting on two sets..." he added.

"Black Warrant" producer Sameer Nair said the "Americans have perfected that (director-showrunner model) and everyone works very hard, all the prep, everything is done... They shoot one episode a week with a different director. "'Friends' was done like that so if you see the credits there's always the different director and the same showrunner. That's why a showrunner becomes such an important person. I think people get misled with what these terms are and what are these people supposed to do..." Nair said.

Tihar diaries sounds like a grim and gritty tale that the streamers are unlikely to greenlight. That's where Nair's expertise and presence of mind comes into play. He tweaked the pitch brief to present it as three young men, imagine one out of an IIM, the other two from two smaller towns, and they meet at a workplace and what unfolds there. Only the workplace will be Tihar jail.

Actors Zahan Kapoor and Rahul Bhat, who played Tihar Jail jailer Sunil Gupta and Tihar Jail DSP Rajesh Tomar in "Black Warrant", also attended the event. A model-turned-actor Bhat's Anurag Kashyap-directed Cannes-premiered Kennedy remains unreleased in India. Bhat is next working on a Hollywood project in Los Angeles. Bhat has received praise for playing Tomar, a senior police official who sternly handholds the rookie jailer Sunil Gupta in the series, said he often lends his life's experiences to the characters he plays on screen.

"With Tomar, I felt that when you are talking about soul, I got that on day one. I am an actor, I only perform for my directors. I don't care about how audiences are going to react, whether I am good or bad... I try to understand the essence that he wants me to portray. I look into my director's eyes and I know whether I am doing good or bad," he added.

Zahan, for whom Black Warrant has turned out to be a career breakthrough with many confusing it to be his debut, said it was "strange" that his two screen credits — his debut film "Faraaz" by Hansal Mehta and "Black Warrant" — are based on true stories. "It's not that I went out and said, 'I am going to champion true stories or I will do such cinema'. It was not at all like that. It just happened to be that way and so that is coincidental." The actor said he immediately agreed to audition for "Black Warrant" when he found out that Motwane was attached to the series. Motwane is working on the second season of the series.

"You know you want to associate with makers that are dedicated to telling stories. I was always a little bit apprehensive of trying to manipulate or manufacture some kind of image or impression in front of the audience which I always found to be slightly dishonest," said the young Kapoor scion.