Ben Burtt on Revolutionizing Sci-Fi Sound in ‘Star Wars’ and 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 lightsaber swish and Darth Vader’s electronic wheezing, the voice of R2-D2, Chewbacca, and for a younger generation, the voice of Pixar’s WALL-E. “I guess I altered the DNA of a lot of young people.”

Burtt, a 12-time Oscar nominee and four-time winner, earned Special Achievement Awards for his work on Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Oscars for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He 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.

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.

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.