Ben Burtt: Revolutionizing Sci-Fi Sound and Creating Darth Vader’s Breathing

Ben Burtt created the sound of my childhood. He gets that a lot.

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“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, that 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 — he 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 — 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 moviemaking.

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 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?”

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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