‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ Sound Designer Ben Burtt to Be Honored by Locarno Film Festival
The Locarno Film Festival will honor multiple Oscar winner Ben Burtt — the sound designer, editor and voice actor behind the ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ franchises — with its lifetime achievement award dedicated to creative pioneers.
The prominent Swiss fest celebrating international indie cinema will be feting Burtt, best known for voicing Wall-E and creating Darth Vader’s mechanical breathing, with its Vision Award Ticinomoda.
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1977’s “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope” was one of the first films he worked on. It was Burtt who created the lightsaber’s famous hum, which he says came from a broken TV set and a film projector.
“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,” Locarno said in a statement. “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.”
Among other prizes, Burtt has won two Academy Awards for sound effects editing, once in 1982 for “E.T.” and again in 1989 for “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” He also received two special achievement sound editing Academy Awards, for “Star Wars” (1977) and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981).
“The list of his innovations is practically endless,” said Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, who noted that “to get Chewbacca’s verse” Burtt “combined the cries of several animals (a bear, a walrus, a lion, and others)” And “for the sound of spaceship doors opening and closing he repurposed the sound of the doors on the Philadelphia subway.”
“Ben Burtt is a pioneer and visionary who has fundamentally changed the way we perceive sound in cinema,” Nazzaro concluded.
The 77th edition of the Locarno fest will run Aug. 7-17.
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