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The beeping of R2D2. The Wilhelm Scream. The swoosh of the lightsaber. Darth Vader’s heavy, mechanical breathing. WALL-E’s electronic warble. Ewokese, the language spoken on the moon of Endor. All of these came from the mind of a single man: Ben Burtt, the multi-Academy Award winning sound designer and voice actor. Burtt is behind a staggering number of sound effects that have since imprinted themselves on the minds of several generations of audiences and are still imitated in school playgrounds around the world today. When the titular character in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) raised his luminous finger and uttered the legendary sentence “E.T. phone home” – that croaking voice that has become the stuff of legend? That was the raspy voice of a chain-smoker Ben Burtt discovered in a coffee shop.
As well as numerous other accolades, Burtt won Academy Awards for Sound Effects Editing twice, in 1982 for E.T. and in 1989 for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as two other Special Achievement Sound Editing Academy Awards for Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
As well as his sound work and his work as editor of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy (1999-2005), Burtt is also an accomplished director in his own right, directing documentaries on varied subjects – from space flight and the space station (Blue Planet in 1990 and Destiny in Space in 1994), to the history of American crime (The American Gangster, 1992) to, of course, his own field: Special Effects: Anything Can Happen (1996). Recently, Burtt created Behold, a non-linear film experience on movies and Outer Space that plays in a permanent gallery at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival: “Ben Burtt is a key part of the Star Wars mythology. A young and precocious sound effects prodigy, he created a library of organic sounds to bring the universe of the film noises to life; these creations became inseparable from the mythology of the Lucasian saga. The list of his innovations is practically endless. For the hum of the lightsaber, he used the sound of a movie projector mixed with a cathode ray tube. To get Chewbacca's verse he combined the cries of several animals (a bear, a walrus, a lion, and others) or for the sound of spaceship doors opening and closing he repurposed the sound of the doors on the Philadelphia subway. TIE fighters flying through space combined the noises of an elephant with the sound of a race-car on wet asphalt, while blaster sounds were taken from hammer blows on the wires of a radio tower. And finally, to get R2-D2's beeps he repurposed the sound of the ARP 2600 synthesizer mixed with his voice. An Academy Award winner for effects in Star Wars, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ben Burtt is a pioneer and visionary who has fundamentally changed the way we perceive sound in cinema.”
The Tribute Program
The Vision Award Ticinomoda 2024 ceremony will take place on the evening of Wednesday, August 14 in Piazza Grande. The Locarno77 program will include a screening of a key title selected by Burtt from his diverse filmography. On Thursday August 15 at 10.30am at the Forum @Spazio Cinema, Burtt will participate in a public conversation with the Festival audience.
The 77th Locarno Film Festival will take place from 7 to 17 August 2024.
Ben Burtt is a sound designer, film editor, director, screenwriter, and voice actor. He has worked as sound designer on many films, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film series, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, WALL-E, Munich (2005), Lincoln (2012) and Star Trek. He is responsible for creating many of the iconic sound effects heard in the Star Wars film franchise, including the voice of R2-D2, the lightsaber hum, the sound of the blaster guns, and the heavy breathing sound of Darth Vader, which he made by breathing into a scuba regulator. Ben is also known for voicing the title character, Wall-E, in the 2008 Pixar movie WALL-E. The winner of four Academy Awards, he is the director of various documentary films. His IMAX film on the history of special effects Special Effects: Anything Can Happen (1996) was nominated for an Oscar for best short subject. He is also the film editor of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. A film scholar, Burtt is a regular presenter of programs for Turner Classic Movies.