Sound Wizard Ben Burtts Star Wars Credentials Got Him Access to Abraham Lincolns A

September 2024 · 7 minute read

There are movie fans, and then there are “Star Wars” fans.

“‘Star Wars’ is an exception. It launched the foundation for my career and formed a fan community which has been amazingly enduring,” veteran sound designer Ben Burtt told Variety before picking up the Vision Award Ticinomoda at Locarno.

“I’ve met so many people who saw these films as children, and it inspired them to get into the movies. I can’t think of anything else that lasted that long in popularity. I will always have this ‘Star Wars’ connection.”

It came in handy when he was working on Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

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“I got fewer opportunities to work on films that, well, weren’t in space. This one was very straightforward. No creature voices, no spaceships, no big sounds. But the original script had Lincoln taking out his pocket watch all the time. He would look at it while thinking and writing and dreaming. I thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to record the actual watch of Abraham Lincoln?'”

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Burtt “went to a lot of trouble” for a full year trying to locate and then get permission to record one of the remaining timepieces.

“One was in the Smithsonian, but they were nervous about touching it – let alone winding it up with a key. Then I found out that the Kentucky Historical Society had the watch that Lincoln allegedly had on his body when he was assassinated [in 1865]. Fortunately for me, their curator was a big ‘Star Wars’ fan,” he laughs.

“When I called, he already knew who I was and immediately agreed to help me. ‘Star Wars’ enabled me to record Lincoln’s watch!”

Burtt also went to the White House to record a “couple of clocks” that were there “back in Lincoln’s times.”

“All these scenes were pretty much taken out in the end, and the creative effort I put into it is not something people will know about – or even care that these are the same sounds Lincoln heard in his life. But I know it.”

A four-time Academy Award winner, Burtt is behind “Indiana Jones,” “E.T.” and “WALL-E.” He also edited the “Star Wars” prequel trilogy, which might be finally getting its due following initial criticism.

“That seems to be true,” he notes. “The interesting thing is that when we made ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ we heard: ‘It’s not as funny, it’s not as good. You have ruined it!’ Then we made ‘Return of the Jedi,’ and people said: ‘It’s too cute. And what are these little teddy bears?’ It has always been a fanbase that’s hard to please, and there’s always been some kind of a backlash,” he recalls.

“Later, with the advent of the internet, you would suddenly get global condemnation. The prequels received a lot of criticism when they first came out, but now, I am hearing people are feeling more comfortable with these films as being more representative of the true core story of ‘Star Wars.’ It just shows you that the audience’s opinion can evolve over time,” he says.

“Also, who knows what’s next with ‘Star Wars’? At some point, the ownership passed into the public domain. Everybody owns it. But you can’t satisfy everyone all the time.”

All these years later, he’s still answering the same questions from fans. 

“The first one is always: ‘How did you do the lightsabers?’ If you play that sound, people all over the world know what it is. On our later films, the actors would hum it while fighting. We had to tell them to be quiet!”

Burtt also came up with R2-D2’s delightful “beeps and boops” and Darth Vader’s trademark heavy breathing.

“When I first started, George Lucas described to me that he wanted to hear a ‘natural sounding world.’ Every time we would manufacture something, it would be made out of sounds that really exist. We could modify them, but he wanted to hear real motors and real animals and squeaky hinges on the doors of the Millennium Falcon. He would say: ‘Make it sound like it was already used,'” he recalls.

“Prior to that, science fiction would go in the direction of electronic sound effects. That was the style and George didn’t want that. For the Wookie, I set out to record bears, mostly. That’s why these things sound authentic to people, even though they might not be able to identify them.”

With “Indiana Jones,” Burtt says, “I loved and enjoyed working on these films maybe even a little bit more” – he would also modify actual sounds, all the while respecting its historical setting.

“We would record vintage aircrafts or at least listen to old recordings of them. Then, we would add our own twist. In ‘Indiana Jones,’ everything is exaggerated. It’s a gigantic comic book. I think of these sounds as comic book bubbles with ‘boom!’ and ‘kapow!’ in them.”

Although his Locarno award is dedicated to “creatives whose work has extended the horizons of cinema,” Burtt didn’t expect it, he says.

“It’s always an honor to get recognized as a post-production person, film editor and sound designer. What we do is rather invisible. The mark of achievement is the illusion that what you see and hear is natural: that it just happened this way. So yes, it’s rare.”

Especially now, when he sees people watching “movies I’ve worked on” on their phones with closed captions. “It’s a problem.”

“I can’t take all my neighbors to the Skywalker Ranch, where they could hear them under great conditions, so I show movies at my house every Saturday night. This ‘film festival’ has been going on for 15 years. I try to spread ‘the sound gospel’ in my little way, in my little world. But globally, it’s a challenge,” he notes.

“The fun of being a sound designer is when someone hands you a sequence, and you start putting sounds in. Immediately, it comes to life. It’s like giving birth to something. You are not on set anymore; suddenly, you are in that world. And you get to be the first one to witness it.”

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