Today I watched Empire of Dreams, the “making-of” documentary included with the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. It’s your standard “troubled production overcoming adversity” storyline, but I was keen on the bit about the film’s sound design. Sound designers don’t get a lot of credit, when you consider that they often must create an aural world from scratch, and in the case of sci-fi films such as Star Wars, a lot of the sounds need to seem otherworldly.
To accomplish this, Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt took a year to build a library of sound effects for use in the original film. He must have spent a lot of time in zoos. George Lucas originally thought that Chewbacca’s “speech” would be comprised solely of dog and bear noises, but Burtt threw a few more animals into the mix, including lions, tigers and walruses that he recorded himself.
R2D2 proved to be the most difficult sound deign to resolve. Once it was determined R2’s character was “childlike,” Burtt came up with a voice by heavily synthesizing his own voice cooing and babbling like a baby.
Although C3PO was played and voiced by Anthony Daniels as an “over-the-top British butler,” Lucas had planned on replacing the voice in post-production with something more like that of a used car salesman. After auditioning several famous voice actors, he was convinced to leave the original voice-track intact, although it was electronically modified to sound more robotic.
David Prowse, the weightlifter-turned-actor who played Darth Vader, wasn’t as fortunate in having his vocal performance preserved. The documentary has an amusing video clip of a scene in which Vader tries to intimidate Princess Leia, only the on-set audio track has Prowse’s voice, British and muffled by Darth’s helmet, sounding weak and even somewhat effeminate. It’s not clear from the documentary whether Lucas had always planned on swapping Prowse’s voice for that of James Earl Jones’ buttered velvet tones, or whether he only did it after he realized how lousy Prowse’s vocal performance was. But it was obviously the right decision. Burtt gets credit for Darth’s iconic raspy breathing. To develop the sound, he put a tiny mic inside a scuba tank regulator, then recoded himself breathing through the mask.
Although Burtt never won an Oscar for his sound work across the six-picture Star Wars series, he received a Special Achievement Award from the Academy in 1978, “for the creation of the alien, creature and robot voices.” And rightly so.