Javed Akhtar Says, You Don’t Create Amitabh Bachchan, They Are Born And They Are Great Because Of Their Talent

Javed Akhtar spoke on his most recent book "Talking Life" at the 16th annual Jaipur Literature Festival. He claimed that actors like Amitabh Bachchan are not made. Rather, they are born, during a talk, he had with documentary director Nasreen Munni Kabir there.

Javed Akhtar was questioned on the notion that Amitabh Bachchan became well-known during the "angry" hero era due to the famous writing team Salim-Javed (Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar). He said, “As far as the ‘angry young man’ is concerned, the image, that character came through films like Zanjeer, Deewar, Trishul and all but I will not say that I have created Amitabh Bachchan. You don’t create Amitabh Bachchan, they are born and they are great because of their talent, not because somebody has created them”. He praised Bachchan as a tremendous actor and one of the top three actors in Hindi film history. Balraj Sahni and Dilip Kumar were the other two actors he mentioned. “Anybody who has any understanding of acting could see that he is an exceptional actor working in a wrong film. The screenplay is bad, or the direction is poor, and so on… Look at the kind of performance he has given in Zanjeer, Deewar, Sholay, or Trishul. Who could do that?” he continued. He also collaborated with Salim Khan to develop great villains. “I thoroughly enjoy writing villain’s dialogues, whether it’s Gabbar, Mogambo, or any other villain. What we admire about these villains is their total lack of guilty conscience. We all have a little villain somewhere inside our mind, but we have a conscience that says ‘this is bad’. He (Gabbar) had no such problem, he was a free person. He was law unto himself,” he added.