Road Rage, Spielberg and an Indian remake !

There is a popular saying in Tamil, which goes - 'Vilayum Payir, mulaiyile theriyum', literally meaning 'How the plant will turn out, will be displayed in the seed itself'. What it really means is how an adult will turn out, can be guessed by how he behaves as a child. Forget it, I am not here to talk about children or how they should shape up to become responsible adults etc. All I am here to talk about is a movie on road rage directed by none other than beloved Spielberg ! This was his debut movie and it was a made-for-TV movie. The name of the movie is 'Duel'.

I heard about the movie from a friend about 2-3 years ago. He remembered the movie, the story, the director but not the name and told me the name of the movie was 'Road rage'. I searched the whole world for it and could not find any movie by that name. Then I hit upon a brilliant idea (Ok.. brilliant by my standards !!) and searched Wikipedia for Spielberg's movies and found out about this one finally. (My mom would have said that if I had put in so much effort while at school or college, I would have turned out differently !!). Anyway, I finally watched the movie a few weeks back with my cousin.

Wow, what an experience !!

Imagine this. You are driving your decent sized car on a deserted highway and you see a huge monstrous looking truck ahead. What would you do? I will tell you what I would do - 9 times out of 10, I would try and overtake the truck from the adjacent lane, just because I know my car can drive faster and also because I will have better visibility of the road ahead.

What if this truck-driver is a complete psycho? (I can hear you saying, aren't all of them psychos anyway ?!)

Dear Stevie, took this as the premise for his debut movie ! 5 minutes into the movie, you know what it is about ! What you dont expect is how engaging a 90 min (originally 74 min) movie on only road-rage can be !

Brilliance of the director shows in every frame. You never get to see the face of the truck-driver. All you see of him is in one instance, his hand, when he waves to the protagonist - David Mann to overtake him, and later his boots as Mann comes out of a restaurant looking for the driver.

High on adrenalin, this movie has a good sound track and the director makes good use of silences to accentuate the dread that the hero feels in the movie. The shot, where the truck driver waves to Mann to overtake him and Mann almosts collides with another car coming from the opposite side, sends chills down your spine !

There are technically only 2 characters in the movie - David Mann (Dennis Weaver) and the Truck !! After a point the truck seems to take on a live of its own and I bet you will never look at a truck the same way again ! As is to be expected, the dialogues are few in number and silences speak louder than words in most places !!

Being a person, who suffers from a modest amount of road-rage, when driving in India, this movie scared me to the core. I am always a little wary of huge trucks, whether in India or in the US. After watching this movie, I have learnt to control my road-rage a little and to try really hard to stay as far away from a truck as my limited patience will permit me !!

P.S : After posting this, I suddenly got thinking (you guessed it right- in the rest room !! Wonder why all great thoughts are born in the rest-room, but thats a topic for a separate post!!) - Can this movie be made in India ?

Not impossible, but I think we need to keep in mind the following: (There I go, bullets again !!)

First thing - where do we go looking for a deserted highway ??
There is no question of overtaking if the vehicles are anyway moving at 10kmph
Silences are impossible. The hero Mani (instead of Mann), would start honking as soon as he spots the truck a km away!!
Where do we fit in an item number? Maybe make Mani go into a roadside dhaba and Bipasha/Urmila/Isha Koppikar or one of the other aging divas would dance to a raunchy song. So that requirement is taken care of !!
What about the heroine who wears an inch of clothing more than the one doing the item number? Where will she fit in? Ok, Mani thinks the psycho driver is going to kill him and imagines his first duet with his girlfriend/wife! Everytime the situation becomes too hot to handle, Mani thinks of subsequent duets. So thats out of the way too!
What about the comedy track? The truck driver can have a cleaner who will get beaten up everytime the driver is angry at something other than the hero. The cleaner will do a lot of foolish things to make people laugh.
And most important, what about the story? I mean, you cant show only the road-rage thing right? Why not throw in a background story for the enmity between the truck driver and Mani? That will give us an opportunity to have a happy family that was destroyed. The family could be Mani's or the truck driver's. Depends on who you think should be the hero !
Entrusting such a responsibility to the more popular directors would not be advisable :

a. Karan Johar - Driver has an affair with Mani's girlfriend and Mani has an affair with Driver's wife. But on seeing each other, Mani and driver realize they are gay and live happily ever after. Road rage cannot be fit in well enough ! Too much glycerine required for shooting. Too much of importance to matters of the heart.

b. Yash Chopra/Aditya chopra - Necessity to introduce chiffon saris and a wet sari song in case of the former and shirtless Mani and skimpily dressed female driver and cleaner in case of latter. Female chorus singers turn emotional at every turning point and start screeching the same theme song (for Yash)! Very expensive but very little clothes (for Adi)! Road rage will appear in a single scene, to introduce the actors.

c. SLB : Truck is in gold. Mani is poor but drives a Ferrari. Road is purple and sky is green. Theme of the movie is Purple and Green. Loud Background score hurts ears. Mani and driver confront each other with loud music playing in the background and both have tears in their eyes. And the truck driver gives away the female cleaner (formerly Mani's love) to Mani, but the cleaner who was constantly crying decides driver looks better than Mani and goes back to him. Where is the road rage?

So the best person that I can think of is Sanjay Gupta. He is very faithful at remaking (!!??!!) English/World movies and does not change the scenes or the story one bit. The dialogues are directly translated to Hindi and Sanjay Dutt acts for free in his movies. Pritam can be the music director, for all he needs to compose music is the internet. The movie will work out to be very cost effective, since all scenes involving the truck and the truck driver can be used as-is. In fact the whole movie can be used as-is, except when Mann is shown. Those scenes can easily be replaced with some close-up shots of Sanjay Dutt mouthing profanities and cool dialogues. Spielberg has not heard of Sanjay Gupta yet, so plagiarism is not an issue (Tarantino did not question our man, why would Spielberg??).

What say folks?