The writer-director-producer duo have come a long way since their first film in 2009. What makes the experimental, risk-taking directors stand out, and what makes their crazy way of story-telling click with audiences?
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, writer-director-producer duo on the job. Image: Netflix
The D2R office in Andheri, Mumbai, is fairly quiet for a rainy Thursday afternoon. Founded by the director duo Raj and DK, the office is an ode to Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK’s love for cinema—with posters of No Country for Old Men, Pulp Fiction and The Big Lebowski, all over. “We love The Dude from The Big Lebowski,” says DK, as he shows us a poster of The Dude’s iconic quote behind his chair on the wall: “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, Man.”
Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, known together as Raj and DK, entered the world of Indian cinema with their first Hindi feature film 99, which released in 2009. The screenwriter, director, producer duo went on to work on films like Shor in the City (2011), Go Goa Gone (2013), and Stree (2018), among others. They later jumped into web series, as OTT platforms started taking off in India, with shows like The Family Man and Farzi on Amazon Prime Video and their latest Guns & Gulaabs on Netflix, winning the hearts of the audience across the country.
Basic interest and a deep love for cinema, owing the latter to their upbringing in the cinema crazy state of Andhra Pradesh, led the duo to quit their jobs in software engineering and enter the world of weaving stories and creating films. “We were doing well as engineers in America, but a whole new world opened up for us in terms of the cinema being made there,” says DK.
Nidimoru and DK—who were based in Detroit and Minneapolis, respectively—wanted to be filmmakers. With a simple motto ‘everybody is a filmmaker at heart’, the duo began writing, having been inspired by a bunch of Indie films. “At our jobs, we were excessively making use of ‘Alt + Tab’. If there was a big programme that we were working on, we’d do that, but as soon as nobody was around, ‘Alt + Tab’, our short-cut to switch tabs and start working on our scripts,” jokes Nidimoru, as he goes on to tell how the duo even wrote a short story titled Alt Tabs about people like them.
Moreover, their regular jobs were making them feel a bit suffocated. It was becoming “restless” and not “satisfying enough”. “We had this ‘keeda’ of doing something in the world of cinema. We would call each other up to discuss what we can do and we decided to write a script,” says Nidimoru. At the beginning, it was pure naivety. The duo had decided to write a screenplay, sell it to Hollywood, and make money, recalls DK. “Once we wrote the screenplay, we realised, we don't know how to sell a screenplay. So we had to make a movie.”