In a new Vanity Fair interview, Matthew Wood, Supervising Sound Editor at Skywalker Sound, shares how James Earl Jones, at the age of 91, has decided to wind down voicing Darth Vader and how Respeecher have been able to fill the voice using archival voice recordings.
Respeecher employees in Kyiv also soldiered on while hunkered down. Dmytro Bielievtsov, the company’s cofounder and CTO, got online in a theater where tabletops, books, and more had been stacked in front of windows in case of blasts. Programmers “training” the A.I. to replicate Jones’s voice and editors piecing together the output worked from corridors in the interior of their apartments. One took refuge in an ancient brick “basement” no bigger than a crawl space.
Back at Skywalker Sound in Northern California, Matthew Wood was the supervising sound editor on the receiving end of the transmissions from Ukraine. He says that they hired Respeecher because the vocal performances that the start-up generates have an often elusive human touch. “Certainly my main concern was their well-being,” says Wood, who is a 32-year veteran of Lucasfilm. “There are always alternatives that we could pursue that wouldn’t be as good as what they would give us. We never wanted to put them in any kind of additional danger to stay in the office to do something.”
What Respeecher could do better than anyone was re-create the unforgettably menacing way that Jones, now 91, sounded half a lifetime ago. Wood estimates that he’s recorded the actor at least a dozen times over the decades, the last time being a brief line of dialogue in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. “He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character,” says Wood. “So how do we move forward?” When he ultimately presented Jones with Respeecher’s work, the actor signed off on using his archival voice recordings to keep Vader alive and vital even by artificial means—appropriate, perhaps, for a character who is half mechanical. Jones is credited for guiding the performance on Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Wood describes his contribution as “a benevolent godfather.” They inform the actor about their plans for Vader and heed his advice on how to stay on the right course.
Before the invasion, there was a near-constant volley of information between Wood, Obi-Wan Kenobi director and showrunner Deborah Chow, and the Respeecher team. Wood says, “For a character such as Darth Vader, who might have 50 lines on a show, I might have a back-and-forth of almost over 10,000 files.” Much of that was changes in dialogue and the subsequent fine-tuning. As the Russian attack loomed, Wood says, he began pulling back. He remembers thinking, I don’t need to go back to them under an air raid siren to communicate this one particular part is a little different. But the Respeecher team’s attitude, he says, was: “Let’s work, let’s work in the face of this adversity, let’s persevere.”
We previously learnt how Respeecher worked on voices for the Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney+ series during the invasion of Ukraine. Read more of the Vanity Fair interview here.
