Ben Burtt: The man behind R2-D2 and Wall-E's beeps

IT'S A RISKY MOVE by anyone's standards. Pixar's delightfully adventurous robot-in-love story "Wall-E" boldly unspools without any human dialogue for the first hour or so. This trick seems akin to having R2-D2 carry half of a "Star Wars" film, speaking only in his emotive whistles, beeps and boops. In fact, Wall-E's "voice" comes from the same source as R2's idiosyncratic technobabble: Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt.

In a renowned three-decade career with Lucasfilm, Burtt, 59, created everything from Darth Vader's heavy breathing and Chewbacca's yowl to the hum of lightsabers (the latter famously conjured from the sounds made by an idling movie projector and some chance microphone feedback). The native of Syracuse, N.Y., also came up with the signature crack of Indiana Jones' whip in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Soft-spoken and unassuming, Burtt is nevertheless sufficiently sound-fixated that he dots a phone interview with a few illustrative beeps and boops. Laughing, he remembers how "Wall-E," which topped the box office this weekend, earning an impressive $62.5 million, came his way: "I had just finished my 29-year, 10-month tour of duty with 'Star Wars,' and I thought, 'Well, at least I don't have to do any more robots.' But when Pixar called, I could see this was something more like a Frank Capra romance with Buster Keaton thrown in. And you had the challenge of not only creating the sound for this fantasy world, but the even bigger task of creating principal characters built out of sound."

Opening on a toxic, abandoned future Earth, the movie introduces Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) as a rolling trash compactor who's developed a sweet-natured personality in his centuries of lonely service processing mountains of garbage. When a sleek robot called Eve lands for an environmental evaluation mission, Wall-E is smitten, determined to follow her to the ends of the earth and far, far beyond.

Director and co-writer Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") admits that at the outset, he didn't know how he wanted his characters to sound -- hence his recruiting call to Burtt three years ago. The story brings to mind George Lucas' "Star Wars" dilemma in the mid-'70s, when he needed someone to confect a whole galaxy of unusual ear candy, and found his and Francis Ford Coppola's preferred sound man, Walter Murch, already booked. Lucas asked contacts at USC's film school to recommend the next Murch, and was pointed to Burtt, then a standout student who held a bachelor's in physics from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa. Burtt would go on receive special achievement awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work on "Star Wars" and "Raiders" plus Oscars for "E.T." and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." (Naturally, he also took part in the new "Indy," supplying the otherworldly pulsation for the crystal skull of the title.)