It is a testament to the many drafts, cuts on the editing floor, visions and revisions that go into an artwork to make it impact an audience’s imagination — diligence, not brilliance, counts in the long run.
“The script described him as a strange dark being on a life-support system, breathing strange. You would hear sounds of mechanics and motors. He might be part-robot, part-human, we really didn’t know. My original concept for Darth Vader was that of a very noise-producing individual. He would come onto a scene and be wheezing like a windmill. You could hear his heart beating… motors turning (when his head moved). He made so much noise that we had to cut back after the first couple of experiments. He sounded like an operating room moving around.”
The above is sound designer Ben Burtt’s explanation of how the voice of Darth Vader, one of the most famous movie villains of all time, came about. It is a testament to the many drafts, cuts on the editing floor, visions and revisions that go into an artwork to make it impact an audience’s imagination — diligence, not brilliance, counts in the long run.
Of course, Vader wasn’t the only example of that on the Star Wars set. The sprawling operation of the first film, far from the billion-dollar franchise it would grow to become, was a chasmic leap of faith. Writer-director George Lucas would face a new problem every day — sometimes it would be disgruntled crew, sometimes a call from a testy producer; sometimes the actors would forget lines, other times the robots and gizmos crucial to that pre-CGI era would break down. Carrie Fisher, the actor who played Princess Leia, would say that Lucas seemed to be on the verge of tears most days of shooting. But there were a few parts of production he wasn’t worried about — the background music, being composed by the already-legendary John Williams, and the voice of Darth Vader.
But not everybody shared his confidence. Behind-the-scenes documentaries reveal how everyone on set was flustered when they saw the masked villain’s hulking figure, soon to be cemented in movie history with lines like “I find your lack of faith disturbing”, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed” and “I am your father”, sounding like a Scot. David Prowse, the English body-builder picked for the role, had grown up in West Country with a Scottish inflection to his voice, far from what everyone had imagined when they were told that Vader would be telekinetically choking bureaucrats, fighting sabre-duels and commandeering dogfights.
James Earl Jones, the man who came to the rescue, died this week at 93. Born in Mississippi, USA and raised in Michigan, he was one of the many theatre veterans who would be bringing stage-acting chops to the Star Wars production. At first, Lucas wanted Orson Welles, of Citizen Kane-fame, to dub over Prowse’s lines, but decided against it because he worried that the voice would be too recognisable. Instead, as Jones often put it, “he chose a voice that grew up stuttering.” The stutter was solved when, one day, his school teacher asked him to prove that he had indeed written the poem he had submitted for an assignment. He read through it in front of the entire class without stopping, poetry to the rescue of yet another lost soul.
But his 150 minutes spent in a studio with Lucas after shooting wrapped wasn’t the end of the deal. It took Ben Burtt’s experiments with the recordings — breathing into a scuba tank’s regulator and recording the sound in variously-sized rooms — that transformed Vader’s voice into one worthy of those ceramic-white corridors in a galaxy far, far away. All Burtt had to go on was “an oddly filtered voice made through a complex breathing mask” in Lucas’s script. Then, when the villain became a superstar after the film’s release, Jones and Lucas spent a full day recording lines for the sequel, wondering if they could catch lightning in a bottle again. Jones tried to give Vader nuance this time, more inflection, more history. Lucas said no: “Keep it to a narrow band of expression”, he said. It would add to the villain’s mysterious origins.
Darth Vader is but one example of Jones’s storied legacy that included many Shakespeare roles, Lion King’s Mufasa and Field of Dreams, but as is wont to happen in show business, movies outshine plays, villains usurp heroes, a life is reduced to a career. So this fan will settle for celebrating the team effort that went into bringing Vader to life as another example of how art is a mixture of accident and ability, effort and ethereality. A crew of unsung musicians, set designers, stunt actors, editors and concept artists work to make most of our favourite films shine. Jones, who responded to most interview questions with a tip of the hat to Prowse, would agree.
udbhav.seth@expressindia.com
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 13-09-2024 at 12:58 IST
