‘The Real Superstar’: Why a French filmmaker is fascinated by Amitabh Bachhan’s screen persona

The Real Superstar is a cradle-to-the-present film about Amitabh Bachchan. But French filmmaker Cedric Dupire’s documentary doesn’t have biographical information or even an interview with the iconic actor.

Instead, The Real Superstar is an assemblage of clips from Bachchan’s movies. Not unlike a Rashid Rana collage painting composed from a multitude of photographs, Dupire’s chronicle cherry-picks scenes from Bachchan’s vast filmography to create a composite meditation on the actor’s screen image.

The result is an alternate cradle-to-the-present account, not of Bachchan the private citizen but of Bachchan the fictional hero. Dupire and co-editor Charlotte Touress borrow freely from across Bachchan starrers to find the clips that suit their own meta-narrative.

“My film isn’t about Bachchan’s real life but his destiny as a character,” the Paris-based Dupire told Scroll. “I imagined what would be the life of someone who is always changing roles. What must be going on in his head?”

The Real Superstar will be shown at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (October 18-23). The 69-minute documentary was previously shown at the 3 Continents Festival in Nantes in November 2023, during a Bachchan retrospective. Bachchan’s daughter, Shweta Bachchan, was among those who watched The Real Superstar at Nantes, Dupire said.

Dupire’s experiment in film semiotics begins with the assertion, “Within his body lives an army of heroes.”...

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