Ben, are there any particular memories you have from in the film?
Ben: Since we go out on special expeditions to gather the sounds, or invent special props, there's a story with every sound. Dennis just mentioned the mine car chase. We wanted the sound of these cars clattering down the tracks, squealing around corners, and we thought, "is there any place where we could go and record something full size like that?" And we ended up making arrangements to go to Disneyland at night when the park was closed and ride all the roller coasters and record them. We went into Space Mountain, turned all the lights on, turned the music off, and ride in the cars or stand along side the track to get them squealing around the corners. Gary Summers and I were working together on that, gathering all these wonderful all-night Disneyland experience. Big Thunder. Matterhorn. All of them completely out of context with the lights on. That was fun.
Right here on the [Skywalker] Ranch, at the time of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', this building did not exist. In fact, no building was on the Ranch. This was just an antique property, and Gary and I used to come out here every afternoon when it was quiet and there weren't any birds or frog to interfere with records. We would stage each sound effect's event here at the Ranch that we needed for 'Raiders'. When you walk out the front door, you'll notice up on the hill here, a big rock outcropping. We spent a day hauling rocks and gravel, everything we could find, to the top of that outcropping and we shoved it down the rock face, recording all the tumbling rocks and dust and grit. We have used, or derived from that recording, just about every rock effect you hear in these movies. When things are collapsing, or a temple falls apart, we'd slow the sound down.
Right here where this theatre is [the Skywalker Ranch Tech Building], we had a shooting range. There was a gully here and some old cars down in it. We brought out some of the explosives guys from ILM and we blew things up here for a while to get a lot of explosions. We found this canyon was wonderful with acoustics because the sound would slap back and forth. We did all the gunshots her for Indy's gun. We did it with much higher-powered rifles. Of course, everything in Indiana Jones is exaggerated. His pistol's not just a .38 caliber pop. We would have used a Howitzer if we could have brought one in here [audience laughs], but we did some gunshot recordings here. Slowed them down and beefed them up a lot to get these sounds. We did all the ricochets here.
There's a lot of stories about trying to bounce bullets around. In fact, we got in trouble here because we had some machine guns. We didn't tell anyone what we were doing and we were out here. We got a little carried away shooting things -- the ground and other targets with live ammunition. We had a permit, but we couldn't tell anyone, so finally a bunch of headlights come down the road. We were doing this in the evening. And people wanted to know if we were terrorists or something. The neighbors were complaining. In any event, this whole outdoor area was our recording studio. So much of 'Raiders' was done right here. We brought a truck up here, and I would run and through myself against the hood as the sound of Indy banging on the hood. Gary Summers did the whip cracks on the road right by here so we could get the echo off the trees. There are many pleasant memories about deriving sounds. There were hundreds of things to gather like that.
It's not just the simple matter of getting the right technical recording. It's about finding the right performance in the right acoustic location. We would tend to do things outside, there would be enough echo, especially in the trees, that when you put that sound in the movie, it would really fit into the context of the location. Like a jungle or something of that sort.
What was ground breaking, in terms of visual effects, for the Indiana Jones movies?
Dennis: It was having to cut in, hopefully perfectly no sign of an effect in there / totally real to not break the reality of it. And that gets harder and harder to do that with every film we did. So, on the artistic side, the attention to the detail, the reality, the feel of a Steven Spielberg directed scene even though he didn't direct that [shot], though he certainly approved everything. Probably, some of the motion stuff we did with the mine chase cars so the didn't look like stop motion, or very much like a miniature, hopefully. So I wouldn't say we invited a lot of new gear for it. It was more being able to use it in a way that was more pristine and more in the style of Steven actually out there directing the stuff for real. And that's really hard to do, or else those shots can just pop and look like they were done by a second unit or something like that.
Where did the Indy punches come from?
Ben: There's one part I'm going to tell you -- I have to protect a few things for future work [wink]. Of course, there's body punches and face punches and they're not so simple to do because, if you've ever had one or delivered one, it's not really loud. It's usually the person going "ouch" or whatever. But movies have a tradition of something enormous, going all the way back to the first punches in movies in the early 1930s. They started out using clapboards and things to make a slapping, punching sound. What we did, right here on the road here, we setup a lot of baseball gloves and catchers' mitts and leather jackets and some football equipment. And what we would do is throw a catchers' mitt in the air and hit it with a baseball bat as hard as you could. You would get a good whack! We took pumpkins and, if you take a croquet ball and put it in a sock, it creates a sort-of nunchuck weapon. We beat the pumpkin to death. Every once in a while, one of those hits is really good, really meaty sounding. So a library was built up of those kinds of things and used for body blows or kicks. We preserved those particular set of effects just for the Indy films because we wanted them to be associated with Indiana Jones every time he swings his fists.
How did you react when you found out George Lucas was going to put a building over your favorite recording space?
Ben: Well, just a few years ago, I brought a gun in and fired it next to the building and recorded it to see whether it sounded the same and it didn't because of the building. I was let down, thinking we had lost... you know, when we initially did those gunshots, we went all around the Ranch. We probably went to 30 or 40 different spots because the whole key to recording gunshots is the location. A good gunshot is multiple syllables, a slap and repeats, but you also want to have some trees around to give it a slow decay and give it character. The best gunshots always have two syllables. That's one of the mistakes people make today, using one-syllable gunshots. That's my opinion.
Dennis: Sound effects, even though I don't do them at all. It's something like what I do, but anyway, sound effects, you can't just go to Garage Band and pull out a gunshot. Some people would think, you've got your punch, put it in the movie, and wouldn't understand why it wouldn't have the effect. All the time that Ben is going for this take-after-take, 30 times later on the Ranch, is that hearing the result and saying, "yeah, that's good." Or "no, that's not good enough." That judgment is really missing in a lot of the stuff today, I think. The Garage Band thing: "solution, boom, put it in, it'll work," but not at all.
Ben: Thank you, Dennis, that was good. I'll hire you for my next interview.