Ben Burtt on Revolutionizing Sci-Fi Sound With ‘Star Wars’ and Creating Darth Vader’s Breathing
Ben Burtt created the sound of my childhood. He gets that a lot.
“Yeah, I hear that often,” says the legendary sound designer, creator of the lightsabre swish and Darth Vader’s electronic wheezing, the voice of R2-D2, Chewbacca and, for a younger generation, that of Pixar’s WALL-E. “I guess I altered the DNA of a lot of young people.”
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Burtt, a 12-time Oscar nominee, and four-time winner — he earned Special Achievement Awards for his work on Star Wars and Raiders of the Los Ark, and Oscars for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — is being honored by the Locarno Film Festival at its 2024 edition with the Vision Award Ticinomoda, a prize dedicated to creatives whose work has extended the horizons of cinema.
“It might seem odd, giving the Vision Award to someone who is a sound designer and sound editor,” admits Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, “but Burtt is such an influence. It’s incredible what this gentleman has done and how influential his work has been.”
In a wide-ranging conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Burtt reflects on the turning points in his career, his lasting impact on the art of cinema sound and whether he really did name the Wilhelm Scream.
Congratulations on the Locarno honor. It seems impossible to sum up a career as eventful as yours, but maybe we could start way back before the beginning. How did you grow up and how did you even get into filmmaking?
I come from Syracuse, New York. My father was a chemistry professor at Syracuse University. My mother also taught there. It was a very middle-class Leave It to Beaver, June Cleaver, kind of existence. A very stable childhood. I had a lot of hobbies. As a child, I loved make-believe, dressing up as a spaceman, a robot for Halloween, that sort of thing. And I loved movies. At the encouragement of my father, I started making movies with his 8mm movie camera, when I was about 10 years old. Stop-motion animation. That was unusual in those days. I started making movies in my backyard with my friends, superhero movies, war movies. That kind of thing. Very similar to Steven Spielberg if you know his little movie [The Fabelmans]. It was very much the same story.
But I never considered moviemaking as a career. It was just one of my hobbies. I went to college and got my degree in physics. But all during the summer, I was making films — Super 8 movies with my friends. I won a couple of national awards in contests for films and for one of them, Pauline Kael was a judge and I actually got invited to New York to meet her. She said: “You don’t need to go to film school, you’re ready: Just become a director.” But I wasn’t that confident. I finished my degree in physics. But in my last year of school, there was a real turning point. Arthur C. Clarke came to my campus to give a talk on science. He was the author of 2001 of course, and that had just come out. The talk was on science, not on the movies, but I ended up being his escort on campus for a day and I started asking him questions about how they did 2001. He went up to the blackboard and did all kinds of drawings, explaining motion control, matte painting, and in-camera effects. I realized: Here is a fellow who is a scientist, but who also exists in the worlds of science fiction and movie making.
I thought, if he can do it, maybe I can take my interest in science, and also go into the movies. I went home and made kind of my own mini-version of 2001, building my own equipment. That film got me some scholarship money to go to film school. I applied to USC and was accepted.
Where did the interest in sound and sound effects come from?
I had grown up being very interested in sound recording. My father had given me a tape recorder back when I was about six years old. I had a serious illness and was confined to bed for a few weeks and he brought a tape recorder home and showed me how to use it. It was a great big, very high-tech device. I was the only kid on the block with something like that. I got very interested in recording shows off the television, stockpiling the sounds and music that I liked, and listening to films over and over again till I could tell you if it was a Paramount picture or Warner Brothers by just the sound.
I was very interested in how the soundtrack and film together completed the whole illusion. So I always put a lot of emphasis on sound in the amateur films I was making. I love visual effects. In fact, I did my thesis on developing a new front projection system. But sound was always there. At USC I became known around the department as the student who could identify every gunshot and in every Western and tell you where it came from. So when George Lucas, a previous graduate of USC, who had made American Graffiti by that point, came searching for someone to gather sound for the first Star Wars movie, he called the campus and asked them: “Is there another Walter Murch around?” Walter had been a classmate of George’s and they had done American Graffiti together, but Walter was tied up doing something with Francis Coppola. That was my opportunity. George, with a lot of foresight, gave me the chance to go out and start collecting recordings for about a year before they actually went into production. He wanted to customize the soundtrack for the film and develop sounds early on, knowing he would need a huge library.
What were you and George Lucas going for in the sound design of the first film?
Well, at the time, most science fiction films contained sound effects and ambiance that were electronic in nature. Things sort of derived from Forbidden Planet, you know, that wonderful electronic score and sound effects that were made for that film. George felt that was a cliche by this point, so he didn’t want to have a synthetic or electronic score or electronic effects of any kind. He described it to me as an organic soundtrack, which meant, let’s go out in the real world and gather acoustic sounds, be they motors, animals or jet planes. Let’s fashion the world of Star Wars out of these real sounds. The idea being that people would inherently recognize the reality of those sounds, the naturalness of them.
When the Millennium Falcon’s doors open, it should sound mechanical, it might squeak, it might be rusty. Because I came from a background in physics and I loved 2001, I initially thought: Well, there’s no sound in space, and I told George that. He was kind of puzzled but he said. “Well, we’re going to have sound and music in space.” He wasn’t shy about creating a world where you hear everything in space. And thank heavens, I guess, because that gave me a career.
We were building more on Flash Gordon and those serials, but creating a more naturalistic science fiction-fantasy environment where the robots are beat up and dented and dirty, where the world wasn’t pristine and clean like you might have found in other science fiction at the time, with people wearing immaculate, beautiful, well-ironed costumes in bright colors.
My job became making appointments to go to factories, airports, any place where there might be something interesting to record, with a recorder slung over my shoulder. Also recording animals. George wanted the Wookiee Chewbacca to be made out of animal sounds — maybe dogs, maybe bears. [In the end, Burtt used a combination of bear sounds with a few walruses, lions and badgers thrown in.] I fashioned the Chewbacca “language” before shooting, so they could see how the actor would work in a costume and the limitations of the prosthetic mask and so on.
Along the way, I created the lightsaber sound [combining the hum of the USC’s film projector machines with the buzz of a cathode ray TV set, recording with a swinging microphone to mimic movement] but the real challenge was R2-D2. Because people evaluate dialogue differently than other sounds, they really focus on speech. I mean R2-D2 has scenes with Alec Guinness, just the two of them talking. So his “acting” has to be up there. It took a long time and really didn’t come together until near the end of post-production.
What was the turning point with R2-D2?
Well, I was trying out a lot of synthesizers and noise-making devices, squeaky hinges, say, moving them around, to make it sound like a language. It wasn’t working. George and I would be vocalizing the sounds to each other that we wanted to hear, like “bleep-bleep, bloop” — like little kids making funny noises, and it occurred simultaneously to us both: “Why don’t we build on that idea, actually include a human performance in the sound?”
First, we thought babies would work and I recorded all kinds of vocals from children, cooing, babbling, etc. But it’s very hard getting a performance out of a baby. I ended up just doing it myself, in combination with a synthesizer, a keyboard. I combined that with my own voice, so about 50 percent was me trying to sound electronic and the other half was the synthesizer trying to sound human-like, and it was blending the two together. I ended up with a series of expressive sounds, to indicate what R2-D2 was thinking at any moment. Because there was a human performance in it, you had a sense of R2 being alive, being sentient, having some sort of soul. That was the key, injecting the human element, but disguising it so it didn’t just sound like someone impersonating a robot.
It wasn’t until a test screening of the film that we knew it worked. The movie starts with two robots talking to each other. It’s just C-3PO and R2-D2 making beeps and boops. It’s a lot to expect for the audience to get that but, fortunately, they did. And we realized that we were on the right track with the robot language.
It’s really incredible to see, watching Star Wars again, how little of those invented languages, R2-D2’s language, Chewbacca’s language, the Ewoks, is ever translated.
George’s intention from the beginning was to not have any subtitling. A lot of times, C-3PO translates what R2-D2 is saying, but for the rest of it, you can infer the meaning because of our universal understanding of non-word expressive sounds. We worked really hard to get those expressive sounds in there. So when R2-D2 makes a rude sound, you know he’s cursing, that he’s frustrated. He can be cute, he can be innocent. And that was important to us — that he was like this little five-year-old in the midst of all this warfare and traveling through the desert, whatever. It’s hard to go back and describe how we were imagining it because we didn’t know, or think we’d be talking about it 50 years later.
You used your own voice on so many of the “sound effects” you created. Is it true that Darth Vader’s breathing is actually you too?
Yes, that’s me breathing. It came about because the script described Darth Vader as having a respirator, some kind of breath mask with a life support system. That’s about as far as the description went. I went to a dive shop here in Marin County where they sold equipment and gave evening lessons. After the lessons were over, there were all these scuba tanks with regulators just lying around the pool. I went around and just recorded different ones breathing through them at different rates. I had a little tiny microphone that I could stuff inside the valve, so it was a very magnified recording of this mechanical opening and closing. Then later I slowed the recording down a bit and that became Darth Vader. We had to cut the breathing to be in rhythm with the speech of James Earl Jones [who voiced Vader] but it was fairly straightforward. Initially, I had too many sounds going: There was the respirator, then beeping, and clicking, mechanical sounds when he was moving, but it was too distracting. So I stripped everything away everything except the breathing. Which of course stuck and has become iconic.
Did working that way — recording original sounds combined with electronic manipulation — set the template for your career in sound design?
Yes, definitely. Star Wars led to a full-time job at Lucasfilm as a sound designer and ultimately film editor. But it was the beginning of the process. I was very new to the business. I had made some sounds for some Roger Corman movies [including Death Race 2000], I’d done some trailers and had a tiny bit of experience in independent films. But that was my first real feature. I was learning as I went. By the time we set out to do the second film, The Empire Strikes Back, we had a much better approach, incorporating a working process to break down the script, break down all the recording projects, and delegate it step by step. We learned fast and we worked out our own system. We didn’t have a lot of Hollywood old-timers or people with experience so we were left to devise our own system.
But I got used to having the man in charge — whether it was Lucas or Spielberg — pay very close attention to the sound design, usually before shooting. Which was not the normal process for sound in Hollywood at the time. People didn’t want to spend money having sound people work on development, they would just bring people on once the picture was locked and the sound people would be expected to work from their studio’s library of pre-recorded sounds. What we developed at Lucasfilm in Northern California eventually became part of a revolution throughout the business.
Is there a major difference between how Lucas and Spielberg work when it comes to sound?
George Lucas was particularly interested in always thinking and talking about sound before any shooting took place. He was also open to experiments, he was never afraid of trying funny things. He liked to develop sounds well in advance, well before the final mix. That spoiled me to some degree because if you are brought in at the last stage when the mix with the music and dialogue is already in place, you can spend weeks just sorting things out. Nobody’s auditioned anything, and it can be a real mess. So George had the right thinking, bringing on a person or a small team early on.
For the Indiana Jones movies with Spielberg, since George also was an executive producer, we followed the same path. I had access to Steven Spielberg, even before shooting began, to interview him and go through the script, asking: “What do you want to hear here? How do you envision this?”
Once in a while during shooting he would contact us with some ideas he had, saying, “We’re going to need jeep sounds here” or “We need some kind of magical sound for the ark,” that kind of thing.
We had the advantage that we grew up in the same era and had a love for the same kinds of movies. We could talk in terms of sounds we loved in movies that we saw growing up. I could say: ‘It’s going to sound like the dinosaurs in Journey to the Center of the Earth,’ and Steven would know what I was talking about. So I was spoiled by my access to the directors.
Later, I had that same kind of relationship with Andrew Stanton, the director at Pixar on WALL-E. They brought me in months before production began to experiment with the possible voices for all the characters, the main characters WALL-E and EVE, and a few other robots.
With Pixar and WALL-E, what was the particular challenge, sound-wise, given you had already created an iconic robot language with R2-D2?
Andrew Stanton had been developing the idea for a while and he had maybe a 10-minute reel of storyboards cut together with some music on top of it. He would refer to the film, as “R2-D2: The Movie.” So Jim Morris at Pixar, formerly of Lucasfilm, said “Why don’t you just talk to Ben Burtt? He did the original R2-D2.” Andrew had the idea that WALL-E and EVE wouldn’t say much except their names but they would have to have a lot of expressive vocals to tell you their state of mind, if they were angry, if they were frustrated or affectionate. The original concept for WALL-E was to have no English dialogue at all. Even the Earthlings we encountered on the spaceship were supposed to have evolved to speak a language that was just gibberish for us.
I started working with the idea of making something like R2-D2 but not R2, to have more buzz and make him sound like a synthetic voice generator. So I tried different voice experiments and eventually came up with a voice synthesis program, which didn’t work very well for voice synthesis. But the artifacts it created — the electronic noise, the flaws, the things that you would normally reject if you wanted a perfect human voice — those appealed to me. But it wasn’t good enough for what I had in mind. So I did a similar thing as with R2-D2. I combined my voice with the machine.
I was in the studio every day experimenting, so it was easier to use myself, I didn’t have to schedule a formal session. It was the same with EVE [voiced by Elissa Knight]: She was an employee at Pixar, so it was convenient. We could work on the script, word by word, without much formality. We’d just work on it, taking about four or five months to find different ways of trying out the voices and the sound effects when WALL-E moves his hands, his arms, eyes, his wheel treads, trying to make them indicate different moods, from agitated to relaxed.
I generated a series of sounds that went to the animator, who would design movements and body language based on those sounds. The video would come back and I would alter my sounds to fit better with the animation. It would go back and forth until we ended up with almost a two-minute audition scene for each character in the film. It was the WALL-E audition that convinced everyone, including Steve Jobs, that we could make a movie about a robot and make him seem alive and have a soul, without using language. That was what got the green light for the movie on full blast. It took a lot of time to create the whole soundscape because I wasn’t working from a library of pre-existing materials.
But you still use stock sounds sometimes, right? I mean, you are the man credited with naming the Wilhelm Scream, a stock sound of a man screaming when falling.
I knew it! I knew this question was coming.
Well, it is attributed to you, and you have used it in many of your films…
Well, I do this as it was an in-joke to myself and a few friends that got out of control and escaped into the world. I never intended that. If you Google me, the first thing it says is: “Ben Burtt, creator of the Wilhelm Scream.” I say to my wife: “Is that what I’m known for?” It was a joke I made once and now I can never live it down.
It was a scream I first heard as a child. I recorded it off the television. It was in many of the Warner Bros. films in the 1950s and ’60s. It was a stock scream in their library, and it had been used in a lot of Westerns. For cowboys getting shot with arrows or whatever. It was just one of the many sounds I had. I had charted the provenance of lots of the iconic sounds from the movies I listened to growing up because I was interested in where things came from and how they were made. The stock thunder or the gunshots in Paramount movies sounded different than the ones in Warner Brothers. I always wanted to know: ‘How did they get the arrows in Robin Hood to sound like that?’ Those things obsessed me.
Anyway, when I got to USC, there was another student there named Richard Anderson, who also became a sound editor [on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Poltergeist among others]. I told him about the scream. Him and a third person, named Rick Mitchell [who worked on Die Hard and Hoffa], who’s no longer with us. We just joked about it. We included a Wilhelm in a film we did for school and all laughed about it. The naming came out of our discussion. I don’t remember whether I said it or Richard said it, but we began referring to it as the Wilhelm squawk. And then we just called it the Wilhelm. When we’d do a student film, we’d stick it in there, taking it from my recording of the TV show. Later, when I became an actual sound editor and we were mixing at Warner Bros. on the first Star Wars movie, I went to their sound library and spoke to the librarian. They didn’t know what a Wilhelm was, because it wasn’t called that, of course, but I was able to find it. So in Star Wars, I stuck it in for a stormtrooper falling into a trench when he gets shot. It was just for my own pleasure. Nobody asked for it. Nobody noticed it. That was it. The next time might have been for More American Graffiti. I stuck it in. After that, I started seeing how far I could go with it. Richard Anderson had gone back to L.A. and he was working on other films, and he started putting it in his movies. We played this game of one-upmanship for 25 years, just the two of us knowing what we were doing.
He would put it in a Quentin Tarantino film and call me up and challenge me to find it. I put it in an Indiana Jones movie. It was a private joke. Nobody said a thing. It wasn’t until the Internet came along, it must have been around 2000 or so when people could collectively talk about trivia and DVDs were on hand so you could study these movies. Suddenly everybody was hearing the same scream on all these Lucas films, and on a few others, and began wondering what it was. Somehow the word got out. I didn’t mention it. But then it escaped onto the Internet and became, what do you call it, a meme? Is that what it is? I don’t know. Now it’s everywhere. I just heard it in a commercial on TV yesterday. An insurance commercial. It’s just crazy. I stopped putting it in. But even when I stopped, my crew would put it in because they felt it had to be there. I couldn’t stop them. I created a monster.
Can you still listen to it without cringing?
I cringe a little bit. Because, you know, it’s kind of like Alfred Hitchcock, when people knew he appeared in all his movies, people would be looking for it. He got worried it became a distraction. So, you’ll notice he started appearing very early on in his movies, in the first two minutes, to get it over with so people could get on with the story. But there’s nothing I can do. It seems like for sound editors now, the Wilhelm is a sort of rite of passage, a kind of audio baptism. You put it in and join the club. But none of it was intentional.
What influence do you think you’ve had on the younger generation, on the art form of sound design?
I was fortunate to be part of a revolutionary moment when Lucasfilm started doing big stereo high-fidelity movies, first in 70 mm because you can have a better soundtrack. The producers realized that having good quality and well-defined sound was an asset to invest in. There was a period with George Lucas and the THX program to upgrade and standardize the sound in theaters, to make it better all over the world. And they did.
From a creative standpoint, after Star Wars and Indiana Jones, the studios and the producers started hiring and paying more attention to sound and wanting to have original sound, have someone or a crew record original sound, not just pull things from a stock library. Of course, you always have to do some stock work in order to get the job done, but after us, people started hiring people to think more about how to make the sound, making sound a bigger contribution to the overall illusion in the movie. It’s obvious in science fiction, where you create worlds we have never heard but you can see it in movies — whether it’s Apocalypse Now, or Master and Commander or whatever — where the sound design is more realistic, more earthbound, but is essential for creating the ambiance and the feeling.
Has the process changed a lot since you started?
The economics of filmmaking and the speed and flexibility you have with digital sound have changed a lot of things. A lot of the work these days is assembled rather quickly, by necessity, which puts more stress on all sound people to keep up. And films change much more now in production because with digital you can keep scrambling, changing, and redoing things until the last moment. There’s a lot of procrastination you never would have had back in the ’70s or ’80s, because with linear film, you couldn’t just keep cutting the negative and changing the sound without really slowing things down and missing your deadlines.
But there are some wonderful soundtracks being made. I saw Twisters the other night here at Skywalker Studios, and I thought the sound was fabulous. I thought The Fall Guy, which came out a few months ago, is really well done, a well-orchestrated sound that helped to tell the story and made it a lot more entertaining and fun.
How do you view the impact of A.I. technology on sound design?
I have mixed feelings of fear and excitement. As a sound creative artist, if you want to put it that way, I look at some of the tools and say: ‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’ There were things that were very difficult to do before, like creating languages for the Star Wars films. But these A.I. tools for creating off-world languages, for combining strange voices, are just amazing. From the standpoint of resurrecting old material, old recordings for doing film restoration, extracting the dialogue and putting in new music, that is also amazing.
On the other hand, I get scared because I always know that two things will happen. One is that it may replace a lot of people doing certain work. It could cut down on the number of people needed to do various jobs. The other thing is that as A.I. gets stronger, it becomes like a sound library where you can just describe what you want, and it will conjure up a sound for you. But does that still represent the soul of one creator, or just a collection of ideas already out there that the A.I. trained on? Am I comfortable with that? I don’t know. It’s a bit frightening. But there’s no putting it back in the bottle.
What are you most proud of? What would you like to turn up as the top result when people Google you?
Gosh, that’s an embarrassing question to try to answer. Making sounds and creating sounds for the movies has its own thrill because you bring a scene to life. The fun part is when you’re handed a scene, a raw cut, and you put sound on it for the first time and it brings it to life. You’ve given birth to the fantasy life of this material. I still get a chill when that happens. It often brings smiles to the faces of the crew and the directors seeing it the first time.
There’s always talk about movies as visual entertainment and while I reluctantly say yeah, the visuals come first, it’s the sound that completes the illusion and can alter the illusion of the picture. You can use sound to change the pace of the visuals, you can create an off-screen world that’s not there. You can extend the movie beyond its frame. What would King Kong be without the sound?
So I have a lot of pride in having been a part of these audible worlds, even the ones that don’t stand out and I don’t have to be interviewed about all the time. Sometimes it’s nice to be anonymous, to just have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made a movie world seem natural. That’s the greatest pleasure and the greatest pride I have in doing this job.
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