When Ben Burtt Jr was invited to look at the concept art for Star Wars before filming began, he says he heard the lightsaber as much as saw it: it was the sound of a film projector. “I was a projectionist at a theatre,” he says. “I could hear a projector motor – not when it’s running the movie, but as it sat still: a musical humming. Fifty per cent of the lightsaber is that projector. I mixed it in with the buzz of a television tube.” So when you hear one of Burtt’s most famous sound effects, you are listening to cinema.
Yet it’s only one part of an amazing aural universe that Burtt has created, as instantly recognisable as John Williams’ theme music. Where would Star Wars be without the sound of Han Solo’s blaster – made by hitting a high-tension wire with a hammer? Or the plaintive yowls of Chewbacca – a melange of vocalisations and animal recordings? The voice of R2-D2 is Burtt himself. “I was trying keyboards with electronic effects, and it didn’t have life. It wasn’t coming from something alive; something that was thinking. It’s only when I was able to channel a voice element into it that it changed. It’s about 50% vocal, 50% electronic.”
I am talking to Burtt at the Locarno film festival where he is receiving a career award, but he’d rather talk about how the small Swiss town sounds. “Last night, there was no sound whatsoever. I couldn’t hear anything: no crickets, no air conditioners. But then the electric train pulling in was really clean. The motor sound – I can immediately see the use for it: slow it down, add subwoofer … it’s a hovering mothership, right?”
Burtt’s first job was recording the sounds of engines for Death Race 2000, produced by the late Roger Corman. “I was a film student at the time. There was work to be had at low-budget studios if you could operate a Nagra recorder – a Swiss recorder, the beautiful, most coveted machine of all time. A friend, Richard Anderson – later, we did Raiders of the Lost Ark – got a job supplying sounds for movie trailers, and Joe Dante was the editor cutting the trailer. He showed me the imagery, and I started recording things for the cars – mostly airplanes. Because they were unusual sounds, they started using them in the feature as well. So it came backwards through the trailer into the feature.”
Burtt says he played with sound as a kid. “I had a tape recorder before I was 10 years old, and I flipped the tape around backwards. So on hearing something, I knew it could be used differently. I recorded hundreds of movies like Forbidden Planet and television shows like Flash Gordon off the television speaker and listened to them.”
As well as Star Wars, the Indiana Jones films and ET, Burtt worked uncredited on many famous movies, including Ridley Scott’s Alien. “I made a sound called ‘molecular acid’. My father, being a chemist, had these containers for liquid nitrogen, which is 200 degrees below zero. If you pour it on the floor, it boils away and sizzles. I used that for the acid eating through things.”
Often work for one project would find new life elsewhere: “Ridley wanted the sound of a transmission beacon coming through space, this repeating distress signal to run for the first 20 minutes of the movie, as if it’s pulling you in. I tried many different things and he didn’t buy any of them. So I ended up with tapes of this interesting unused material. Then Raiders of the Lost Ark came along, I pulled out one of my favourites, and it became the sound of the ghosts coming out of the Ark of the Covenant. Don’t tell Ridley!”
Does that happen a lot? “I call it cross-pollination. Later, when Ridley did the different versions of Alien on DVD, he put that sound back in. So it’s in the movie now. Many of those sounds I did ended up being used in Blade Runner. In Deckard’s apartment, there’s a weird tonality, sort of up and down, up and down. It’s on YouTube now, people have made 12-hour loops of it.”
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During our conversation, Burtt physically or vocally performs many of his sound effects. He also gives me a spot on impersonation of Joe Dante, as well as WALL-E, the titular robot from the hit Pixar movie. “As a sound person, the most useful sounds are ones you perform, not just vocally but also with props like a foley artist. If you have a squeaky door knob, you perform with it because you’re trying to get a feeling into it. I’m alone in the studio for weeks at a time. So I’m an experimenter. If I want to test something, I’m not going to bring an actor to try it right away. I love trying it myself. I’m an old ham.”
After Burtt has left, I can’t help but listen to the sound of the fan in the building. It could be the soft whirr of an arriving spaceship. Is this how Burtt hears the world? It sounds good.
Source: theguardian.com
