WALL-E has one of the most unique starring credits I’ve ever seen for a movie.
The title character of WALL-E is listed as being played by Ben Burtt, and this is true, Ben does provide the vocals when the character speaks. But he also not only modulated WALL-E’s voice but did all of WALL-E’s sound effects, and designed most of the sounds in the movie.
WALL-E is not only Andrew Stanton’s love letter to the science fiction stories of his childhood, but also it’s a celebration of the career of Ben Burtt, one of the greatest sound designers of all time.
Star Wars - The Original Trilogy
Lightsabers. TIE fighters. Chewbacca. R2-D2.
All of these and more, given life through sound by the one and only Ben Burtt.
Burtt was interested in movies as a child, making stop-motion 8mm films, but was less interested in directing his own films as he was in the intersection of movies and technology; his father was a chemistry professor at Syracuse University.
While pursuing a degree in physics at Allegheny College, he got a creative spark when 2001: A Space Odyssey author- who also adapted it for the screen- visited the college in his last year:
The talk was on science, not on the movies, but I ended up being his escort on campus for a day and I started asking him questions about how they did 2001. He went up to the blackboard and did all kinds of drawings, explaining motion control, matte painting, and in-camera effects. I realized: Here is a fellow who is a scientist, but who also exists in the worlds of science fiction and movie making.1
Little did Burtt know that he would end up being at the forefront of science-fiction filmmaking, building on the incredible work Kubrick and his crew did on 2001 with his work on Star Wars. 2001 is notable for its grounded, realistic approach to science-fiction: movies in the genre before it went more fantastical and a bit silly. Burtt and Lucas would take a similar approach with their space opera, which on paper sounded silly but on the screen would look more like a documentary of a real galaxy far, far away.
Lucas found Burtt through USC: after his inspiration from Clarke, Burtt moved out west and got his masters there at the film school, which launched many famous film careers including John Wayne, Ron Howard and Kevin Feige. The Star Wars director had gone to the heads of his old film school to ask for a promising sound designer when his usual collaborator Walter Murch was busy changing cinematic sound design forever with his work on Apocalypse Now (Murch is worthy of his own essay down the line).
Lucas and Burtt developed a unique technique called “worldizing”, which involved going to real locations outside of a studio and recording unique sounds to capture a specific ambience: in the case of Star Wars this meant going to airfields to record unique WWII planes and to zoos to record animal sounds that would be morphed into the voice of Chewbacca.
His work is so iconic from the original Star Wars film alone, and also won him his first Oscar!
Burtt’s work continued as Lucas brought him onto almost every project he did for the next few decades, which happened to include a lot of Star Wars. But it also included another iconic trilogy…
The Indiana Jones Trilogy
For Raiders, Burtt shifted to sounds that were even pulpier than that of Star Wars: guns, whips, arrows, and even poison darts take on a personality of their own, in nods to the adventure serials of the 1930s which inspired the series.
My favorite sound is that of the iconic boulder from Raiders’ opening sequence, which was actually one of the more difficult sounds for Burtt and sound re-recording mixer Gary Summers to crack:
We would do gunshots and we would do explosions and we worked on the boulder. We rolled things down the hills out there–we got rocks and rolled them and nothing really seemed right. But one afternoon we were coming down one of the hills here in a little Honda Civic station wagon that belonged to the sound department. We were coasting on the road that had big rocks–sort of baseball size rocks. There was this great crunching and rumbling of a sound with the car moving over the rocks. I thought…that could be the boulder! We had our gear with us, so I just hung out the back of the car and recorded where the tires rolled over the rocks–no motor–and that became the basis for the boulder.2
Raiders, along with Star Wars, also provided opportunities for Burtt to make famous a unique sound he had heard in a Western, 1953’s The Charge at Feather River, dubbed the “Wilhelm scream” after the character who it originated from.
Burtt used it famously for a falling stormtrooper in Star Wars, a falling Nazi in Raiders, and even on the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special (for yet another falling Stormtrooper). The sound effect would appear not only in later Star Wars and Indiana Jones films but would make regular appearances in other franchise films like Lord of the Rings, Batman, and Toy Story.
The Prequel Trilogy
By the time George Lucas got around to doing Episodes I, II, and III, he had come to trust Burtt so much that he actually asked him to edit all three films, a gargantuan task considering how ambitious all three of those films were.
But he still got to work on all the sound design, and actually all of my favorite Ben Burtt sounds are from this movie.
To name a few that come into my brain immediately:
Jango Fett’s blasters and Slave 1
The entire Podrace sequence
The Geonosians
The Acklay
The Sando Aqua Monster
And, last but not least, arguably the greatest of all Star Wars sound effects, Jango Fett’s seismic charge
Burtt on his inspiration for the sound:
I think back to where that idea might have come to me...I remember in film school a talk I had with an old retired sound editor who said they used to leave a few frames of silence in the track just before a big explosion. In those days they would 'paint' out the optical sound with ink. Then I thought of the airlock entry sequence in ‘2001’. I guess the seeds were there for me to nourish when it came to the seismic charges.
One of the biggest mistakes of the sequel movies was not bringing back the crew that had worked on the prequels3 or even the original trilogy, particularly Burtt. Can you think of a single iconic sound from those films that wasn’t originally from him?
WALL-E
No disrespect to Andrew Stanton, but I would feel confident in saying that Ben Burtt is the true auteur of WALL-E.
The entire first act relies pretty much on Ben’s sound design, Roger Deakins’ visual consulting, and Thomas Newman’s score. If that combination doesn’t make an incredible movie, I don’t know what will.
I’m not sure how much I can say about Burtt’s work on WALL-E that isn’t better captured by the video above, but I will say if you’re going to watch any of the videos linked above (although you should watch them all) I would recommend this one. Burtt’s passion and creativity shine here as he shows off some old Disney sound effect machines (which he actually used on the film) and creates the voice of WALL-E.
Both this video and the one of his work on Episode II were a huge inspiration to me as a kid when I was just learning about what it takes to make a film. For a while, these videos convinced me the greatest job in the world was to be a sound designer (specifically a foley artist). It taught me that making movies could actually be really fun!
Cheers to Ben Burtt, one of the best to ever do it.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/locarno-award-ben-burtt-star-wars-sound-designer-1235959811/
https://soundworkscollection.com/post/ben-burtt-on-the-sound-of-raiders-et-and-spielberg-s-inspiration
Burtt’s sound assistant on Revenge of the Sith, Matthew Wood, does his best to continue Burtt’s legacy both for the new films and the TV shows, having worked on every movie since Force Awakens. He’s also the voice of General Grievous (replacing Gary Oldman of all people when George wanted a more savage feel to the character) and the battle droids for pretty much all their appearances from Sith onwards
The lightsaber will probably always be the greatest and most iconic sound of Star Wars, but for visceral impact, it doesn't get better than those seismic charges. To add to the quote you provided, I seem to remember Ben Burtt saying on the commentary for Attack of the Clones that the charges are like an "audio black hole" that sucks all sound in (hence the silent moment) and then it's all exploded out. It was so awesome hearing that in the theater.