Ben Burtt knows a thing or two about sound – famously, with four Oscars to show for it (two special awards for his work on Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Best Sound Effects Editing for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). When we sit down for our chat in a hotel lobby in Minusio, in one of the Locarno Film Festival’s partner establishments, the first thing he does is ask the publicist to adjust the position of the large fan that’s keeping us from sweating profusely, so the whirring of the machine won’t interfere with the recording. Twenty minutes later, once we’re finished, he looks at my phone and says, “I hope it’s not all fan noise.” No need to worry.
Burtt is the 2024 recipient of the Vision Award Ticinomoda, a prize introduced in 2013 to honor those who work behind the scenes and are perhaps not as well-known as they deserve to be. The inaugural award went to special effects legend Douglas Trumbull, and subsequent honorees have included composer Howard Shore (2016), title sequence designer Kyle Cooper (2018) and editor Pietro Scalia (2023). Burtt is the second sound designer to receive the prize, after Walter Murch in 2015.
Not that sound was an actual career goal: Burtt originally studied to become a physicist, with moviemaking as a hobby. That hobby sparked his interest in the audio domain, since sound had to be added in post-production, and when he eventually enrolled at the University of Southern California (shortly after future collaborator George Lucas had graduated) he became the go-to sound guy for fellow students. “And when Lucasfilm came looking for people to work in that department on the first Star Wars, my name came up.”
The rest, as they say, is history: Chewbacca’s roars, Darth Vader’s breathing, R2-D2’s bleeps, the distinctive lightsaber noise, all of that came from Burtt’s experiments with various noises. The first film in the galactic saga also featured his first use of the so-called Wilhelm Scream, a library sound effect he originally used as “an embarrassing inside joke” with fellow film student Richard L. Anderson, with the two of them incorporating it in every project they worked on. “For about 25 years, no one really paid attention to it. Then, with the Internet and DVDs, people started noticing.”
Working on the movies set in a galaxy far, far away is an experience he looks back on fondly, primarily because of how the collaboration with Lucas worked: “He involved the sound department early on in the process, whereas most filmmakers start thinking about it after shooting.” Burtt mentions the example of the podracing sequence in The Phantom Menace, a film on which he also served as the editor. “I started working on that sequence months before George actually shot it. Matthew Wood, who has since gone on to have greater responsibilities at Lucasfilm, was my assistant, and we particularly enjoyed coming up with temporary voices for the various aliens, some of which were good enough to be included in the finished film.”
He’s also proud of some of the less ostentatious work he’s done, particularly for more grounded projects like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, for which he set out to record the noises of as many objects the real president had come into contact with as possible. This includes Lincoln’s actual watch: “We tracked down two of them. One was in the Smithsonian, and there was no way they would let us anywhere near it. The other one was in Kentucky, and the guy who had it happened to be a Star Wars fan, so when I said who I was he immediately agreed.”
As a moviegoer, Burtt recently enjoyed the sound design in The Fall Guy and Oppenheimer (“Very interesting sound work, like in all of Nolan’s films”), the latter being, of course, the brainchild of a director who still favors an analog approach to the craft. As someone who, through Lucasfilm, had a front row seat when it came to technological evolution in Hollywood, how does Burtt view the use of digital tools? “It has its upsides and downsides. The upside is cleaner work, because when you had to put everything together analogically, you’d then have to make a copy of the film, and with every copy you lose a little something. The main downside is, it leads to procrastination, because you can change things at the last minute.”
