How Dug Dug builds a motorcycle god in its absurdist universe?

He adds, “In it, he talks about how, for example, when people start focusing on a stone and putting their attention onto it, say, back when we were cavemen, four people might begin thinking that there’s something different about this stone. Then more people start believing the same thing, and eventually something happens because of our attention, belief systems, and collective focus.” While this might suggest a philosophically dense film, Dug Dug operates in an almost opposite register. Its tone remains light-hearted, leaning closer to satire, and this sensibility informs its visual language, (shot by Aditya A Kumar). The frames possess a distinctly graphic, near comic-book quality in their staging; compositions appear highly pictorial, often privileging some sort of symmetry.

Inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Elaborating through a specific example, a scene in which three policemen are arranged in a manner that is at once stylised and faintly absurd, Pareek observes: “There is something called symmetry and then asymmetry. So the entire frame is very asymmetrical and designed to make your eye move in a particular way. All of that is intentional.

Because it’s designed for a big-screen experience, you have to track eye movement and everything. At the same time, while making it a little funnier, the staging also has to work in that manner. And since it’s a satire, I can play around with the staging to elicit a smile. So that was the idea.”

Pareek spoke about the film’s fantastic opening sequence

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Expanding on the film’s visual design, Pareek reflects in detail on its opening sequence, arguably among the most striking in recent years. The film begins with its rural, inebriated protagonist, Thakur (Altaf Khan), dressed in a dhoti-kurta, setting off on his modest Luna after satisfying his appetite for drink and nicotine at a Rajasthani roadside dhaba. Bathed in pink and blue lighting, the sequence unfolds along an expansive highway, accompanied by stylised background scoring. Drawing a parallel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Pareek explains: “In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick initially cut the Stargate sequence to Pink Floyd’s Echoes, which is like a 22-minute track with four distinct sections. Someone on the internet synced the entire Stargate sequence with Echoes, and it works unbelievably well, it completely transcends the experience. So my thought was: this is the foundation of the film’s visual identity. This is what I want to achieve with the entire film.”

Montages and expansion of time

He further adds: “And what usually happens now is that people cut purely on beats, which makes things predictable. But what about movement? What about feeling? That’s what I wanted to achieve. So every decision we made for the opening sequence was in service of that purpose. And we storyboarded everything, every single shot, down to the bone. The idea was to establish what the rest of the film would look like with all the montages, so we wanted to prepare the audience from the beginning.” Speaking of montages, central to the film’s structure, Pareek notes: “All the montages were written in the script. It all started with the idea that since most of the film is visual, there are very few dialogues, so the question was: how do I show the growth of the temple visually, without explicitly saying it? Also, every time the montage stops, people assume, ‘Okay, now it’s over, now the actual scene begins.’ But then something entirely different happens and it moves in another direction, and again it starts building through more details.”

Pareek elaborated on the symbolism behind the recurring visual of a man inflating a balloon throughout the film.

He also refers to a recurring visual motif: a man blowing a balloon that continues to expand throughout the film: “In my mind, that became a kind of metaphor. Since the beginning, the audience keeps expecting the balloon to burst, that the film will end there, or the montage will end there, or something will happen. But I thought, no, that should never happen. The balloon should just keep expanding. Everything that was happening would cut alongside the balloon to show expansion of this lore. That became the central visual idea.” Well, this motif invites another reading aligned with the film’s preoccupation with manifestation, as its endless expansion can be seen as an allegory for how individuals construct and inhabit self-contained realities.