Ben Burtt Revolutionizes the Sound of Sci-Fi with ‘Star Wars’

Ben Burtt created the sound of my childhood. He often feels it.

“Yeah, I hear that a lot,” says the legendary sound designer, who created the lightsaber hiss and Darth Vader’s electronic whistle, the voice of R2-D2, Chewbacca and, for the younger generation, Pixar’s WALL-E. “I guess I’ve altered a lot of young people’s DNA.”

Burtt, a 12-time Oscar nominee and four-time winner, won special awards for his work on Star Wars And The Raiders of the Ark of Losand Oscars for AND THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL And Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — is honored by the Locarno Film Festival in its 2024 edition with the Vision Award Ticinomoda, an award dedicated to creatives whose work has broadened the horizons of cinema.

“It may seem strange to give the Vision Award to a sound designer and editor,” admits Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, “but Burtt was so influential. It’s incredible what this man did and how influential his work was.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with The Hollywood ReporterBurtt reflects on the turning points in his career, his lasting impact on the art of film sound, and whether he really named Willhelm’s Scream.

Congratulations on your distinction at Locarno. It seems impossible to summarize a career as eventful as yours, but perhaps we could start well before the beginning. How did you grow up and how did you even get into cinema?

I’m from Syracuse, New York. My father was a chemistry professor at Syracuse University. My mother was also a professor there. It was a very bourgeois town. Leave it to BeaverJune Cleaver, kind of existence. Very stable childhood. I had a lot of hobbies. When I was little, I loved to play pretend, dress up as an astronaut, a robot for Halloween, that kind of thing. And I loved movies. At my dad’s encouragement, I started making movies with his 8mm camera, when I was about 10 years old. Stop-motion animation. It was unusual at the time. 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 pretty much the same story.

But I never considered filmmaking as a career. It was just a hobby of mine. I went to college and got my degree in physics. But all summer I was making movies – Super 8 movies with my friends. I won a few national awards in film competitions and for one of them Pauline Kael was a judge and I was 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 so 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 lecture on science. He was the author of 2001 of course, and it had just happened…