A bike becomes a God in Ritwik Pareek’s debut directorial Dug Dug. It is put up on a pedestal, worshipped in a temple and showered not with fuel but alcohol. The story is not just a quirky idea from the mind of an indie director but is rooted in the real-life tale of Om Banna aka Bullet Baba. Back in 1988 after Om Singh Rathore died in a motorcycle accident, his Royal Enfield was taken to the police station. The next day, surprisingly it was found back at the accident site. The cops shrugged off the phenomena as a prank and brought it back to the station. The legend goes that even after drying the motorcycle of petrol and subsequently putting it in chains, it kept going back to the site. Superstition spreads fast. A shrine and then a temple popped up soon. Om Banna went from dead to deity.
Ritwik, who hails from Jaipur, remembers visiting the temple while on a road trip when he was a child. “I must be in the ninth standard,” he recalls. “My family and I used to go visit shrines and temples. There are a lot of them like Om Banna’s in Rajasthan and I have seen almost all of them.” He says that the experience etched firmly in his memory when he later saw an episode on the temple in the 2006 TV series Mano Ya Na Mano. “And I was like, hey! I have been there!”
The story came back to him when he was fishing for ideas for his first feature. “I wanted to make something on manifestation and how thoughts become belief-systems and ultimately become superstitions,” says Ritwik. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021, followed by screenings at MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and Indian Film Festival of Melbourne, among others. Its release, however, was hampered by Covid-19. “Even after the pandemic everybody was like now it has been too late to release the film,” says Ritwik. But then he met Anurag Kashyap.
“In 2022, he was conducting a masterclass at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK),” remembers Ritwik. “Somebody in the audience asked what can anybody do to impress him and he answered ‘Give me a Blu-Ray of your film.’ Luckily, I had one of Dug Dug in my bag, that too with multiple-language subtitles.” Anurag, however, could only catch the film later at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA). “After the screening, he called me up and asked me to meet him on the sets of Kennedy and there he introduced me to producer Ranjan Singh of Flip Films,” says Ritwik. The latter aided him in getting a release. The Indie Justice League of directors--Vikramaditya Motwane and Nikkhil Advani with a new entrant Vasan Bala—was also summoned to promote the film. It finally got a release last Friday.
Dug Dug opens with a long, hypnotic sequence in which the soon to be deceased Thakur Sa enjoys a breezy, bike ride after a drinking session. Ritwik says his favourite opening sequences are in Easy Rider (1969) and Top Gun (1986). “But they were both set against a song. We didn’t have one. So, we went with poetry,” he says. The film also has a vivid visual-design filled with neon-lights and bright colours, predominantly pink and blue, the palette of Thakur’s Luna moped. “Every religion has a colour scheme. Red can denote goddess Durga’s devotees, yellow can be Lord Ganesha’s, green is associated with Islam. Most colours were actually taken,” says Ritwik with a laugh. “So, we ultimately zeroed in on blue and pink.”
Although Dug Dug is essentially a social satire, Ritwik’s inspiration for the film’s visual language was science fiction director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He calls James Cameron his guru when it comes to navigating the tricky landscape of filmmaking and labels the recently-released Project Hail Mary as his “best cinematic experience in a decade.” To make it official, we ask him if he is interested in science fiction. “That’s the dream,” he says. “To ultimately make a science fiction film.”
