“You don’t create Amitabh Bachchan, such actors are born,” says Javed Akhtar : Bollywood News

Javed Akhtar attended the 16th edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival to talk about his new book, ‘Talking Life’. During a conversation over there with documentary filmmaker Nasreen Munni Kabir, he said actors like Amitabh Bachchan are not created but are born.

“You don’t create Amitabh Bachchan, such actors are born,” says Javed Akhtar

Javed Akhtar was asked about the belief that the former writer duo Salim-Javed (Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar) made Amitabh Bachchan popular during his “angry” hero era days. “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,” the 78-year-old said.

He called Bachchan an exceptional actor and one of the three best actors Hindi cinema has ever seen. He also named Dilip Kumar and Balraj Sahni as other two stars. “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 added.

He also created iconic villains with Salim Khan. “I thoroughly enjoy writing villain’s dialogues, whether it’s Gabbar, Mogambo or any other villain,” Akhtar said. “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 said.