How Ewoks, Dinosaurs, Terminators, and Woody From 'Toy Story' Got Their Unique Sounds

Gary Rydstrom directing Evan Rachel Wood in ‘Strange Magic’

Gary Rydstrom is a seven-time Oscar winner, a world-renowed sound and effects craftsman, and, at 55 years old, a first-time feature film director.

The director, whose new animated musical Strange Magic opens on Friday, graduated USC and then went to work Lucasfilm in 1983. He would go on to become a sound designer and special sound effects artist on 90-plus TV shows, shorts, theme park rides and films, including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, Terminator 2, and nearly every every Pixar film.

His career has spanned great leaps in technology, from the analog devices that required dubbing and tape reels back when he began to the sleek, crisp digital audio employed in film today.

“There’s a richness to the real world of sounds that you can’t duplicate synthesizing,” he says. “As the computer animation world developed and movies like Jurassic Park were creating dinosaurs in a computer, I thought it was even more important for the sound to be real so that when you watch the movie, you just think that’s a real tyrannosaurus rex romping around, sound is doing its part and telling you that this is real, not manufactured.”

Upon first joining Lucasfilm, Rydstrom worked in the machine room of Sprocket Systems — which would become Skywalker Sound — helping to do the technical tasks, like patching and dubbing, that aren’t even needed in this era of digital tools.

Amongst his earliest credits are the Disney Parks’ Star Tours ride and several Star Wars TV shows, for which he helped legendary sound designer Ben Burtt perfect the audio on things like the Ewok language. He later mixed sound on the first two Star Wars prequel films, and will be involved in the upcoming sequel The Force Awakens, though the project hasn’t come to his division yet. “It’s early for us,” he says.

Rydstrom spoke with Yahoo Movies about some of his most iconic and influential efforts over the course of a 32-year career.

The Pixar Years (1983-2012)

Rydstrom worked at Lucasfilm way back when Pixar was still a division of Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic. John Lasseter and Ed Catmull’s little experimental unit was located in the same building as Rydstrom’s office, and the young sound designer began collaborating with the group from its very first short film, Luxo Jr., which features the lamp and ball that would become the studio’s mascot.

Rydstrom is the man responsible for those now-iconic squeaks, squawks, and clip-clops, which he wanted to sound more realistic than most cartoons’ soundtracks at the time.

“[The sound of the lamp]was a lightbulb screwing and unscrewing in a socket,” he says. “Sometimes sound effects recording is a matter of trying stuff, and then, occasionally, you get little snippets of an interesting sound, and the job you have is to go back into the studio and kind of pull them out. So [I would] do this lightbulb thing, or I would rub two pipes together, and every once in a while it would go, ‘oooh-uuuup!’ and have just a little personality to it, and then you’d take those little bits and you’d cut them against the picture.”

By the time Luxo Jr. was shown at the 1986 SIGGRAPH convention — a massive computer graphics gathering — Pixar had been bought by Steve Jobs. Throughout his years at Pixar, which he sold to Disney in 2006, Jobs served as a consultant of sorts for the young animators, helping to guide them by giving them honest feedback and sometimes stinging criticism.

“He would go to the screenings of movies, and his role was to be the really honest guy and say what no one else would say,” Rydstrom remembered. "So if something wasn’t working… he gave you his honest opinion. He would really get to the heart of it. If the ending wasn’t right or something tonally wasn’t right, or he didn’t get it [he would tell you]. Everyone would listen and he’d usually be right.“

When Pixar graduated to feature films with 1995’sToy Story, Rydstrom remembers Jobs providing the money and emotional support needed during a very up-and-down production. Rydstrom was there to help establish a soundscape for their new fanciful world. Some characters required two voices: Their actual personalities, and the sounds they made when being used as toys. Both Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) necessitated distinct sounds for the voice boxes that they carried within.

”[For Woody], there was probably a little record in [his] chest — you pull the string and it turns around,” he says. “Hanks performed [his lines] in a fairly mechanical way, like a bad actor, and then we put the sound of a record scratch under it, the little mechanical sounds,” he explained. “And with Buzz, it was the same thing. Tim Allen goes, ‘Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue!’ and it sounded like you just hit a button and there was a little chip in there.”

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

As the Star Wars days faded away, Skywalker Sound and ILM worked more and more on outside productions, including projects for Lucas pal James Cameron. Rydstrom’s first Oscar win came for his work as the sound design on Terminator 2, which he remembers as gleefully experimental.

While Rydstrom preferred to base his effects on real-life objects, there was nothing with which he could compare to the T-1000 robot’s formation from liquid metal. That ensured him the freedom to try some very weird stuff.

“One of my favorite sounds was one [in which] I’d take compressed air and spray it into a bowl of flour and water goop mixture that I’d make, and record it from inside the flour and water goop mixture by taking the lavalier [microphone], putting a condom on it, stick it in the goop, and then record it. If you spray the compressed air it makes a little bubble out of the liquid, it squirts this air into the goo, and it’s metallic and gooey at the same time.”

But the absolute coolest sound in Terminator 2, Rydstrom said, was absolute silence.

“Cameron is really good at this —creating contrast — and he likes quiet-to-loud, loud-to-quiet, etc. So when Schwarzenegger shows up in this sphere, naked and hunched over, the sphere sound is the sound I made with… I did a lot of stuff back then by taking a string bow and scraping it against different things,” he said. “But the most interesting thing is the silence before. It goes dead silent, and the only thing you hear is the paper moving in the wind, and then the ball shows up and it’s ‘voom!’ and it climaxes and drops off.”

Jurassic Park (1993)

Rydstrom’s second set of Oscars came for his revolutionary work on Steven Spielberg’s massive box office hit. Despite an obvious lack of historical record, he had to figure out what dinosaurs might have sounded like, and bring the robotic models to life in a way that would scare the hell out of audiences.

The process was just as scary as the end result.

In order to create the dino-noise, Rydstrom brought in a reptile handler visit the studio with his collection of exotic cold-blooded friends.

“The way he got a tiger lizard to vocalize pissed it off so much that the tiger lizard whipped around and bit his arm,” Rydstrom remembered. “He was trying to get it to hiss by rubbing his head or pissed it off and he paid the price, and I kind of learned from that that you don’t want to manipulate the poor animals, you want to just let them do what they do. The best hiss I ever got was a goose, and goose are nasty animals anyway, you just stick a microphone in its face, it’s pretty easy to get."

Strange Magic

After directing two shorts for Pixar, including Toy Story Toons: Hawaiian Vacation, Rydstrom made the leap to feature director on Strange Magic. The film, which stars Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming as the voices of a beautiful fairy and ugly Bog King, respectively, was a passion project of Rydstrom’s long-time boss, George Lucas.

Jumping on board a few years ago, Rydstrom was finally able to shape a full-length movie to match his own vision.

"I love doing sound, but it’s always for someone else’s movie and someone else’s vision of the movie. Sound design is all about control, and being a director is always in control,” he says. “But it’s daunting… There’s a mood to hopefully every moment in the film that the lighting helps set and the animation helps set, and telling the story with movement is really fun.

Photo credit: Strange Magic © & TM 2014 Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved.