BB-8, with its lighter thumb and sass, is one of Star Wars: Episode 7 The Force Awakens’ unqualified successes. But it took a lot of iterating to get there. In a recent Reddit AMA Ben Schwartz, one half of the BB-8 vocal team, revealed that BB-8 had actual lines at one point in the production.
J.J. Abrams originally hired Schwartz, known for his role as Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Recreation, and Bill Hader (SNL, Inside Out, Trainwreck) to add some personality to BB-8.
The Creation of BB-8’s voice in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’
“Hey I have this new droid called BB-8, and I want him to have personality.” Ben Schwartz describes J.J. Abrams as saying, “You know, everybody loves R2-D2, but I want to put him in situations where he can feel warmth, and he can be funny, and he can do all these things.”
The plan they came up with is a fascinating departure from what actually ended up on screens when Star Wars: The Force Awakens hit theaters.
“We wrote real dialogue for him,” Schwartz says. The dialogue was improvised to footage from The Force Awakens, then sent to Lucasfilm for conversion into bleeps and bloops.
Ben Schwartz (@rejectedjokes) says BB-8 Has actual dialogue in #StarWars: #TheForceAwakens: https://t.co/rw9qET821D pic.twitter.com/qba4QdwyTz
— Yahoo Movies (@YahooMovies) February 11, 2016
Yes, BB-8 was originally like Kenny on South Park, with words that are indistinguishable but clearly originating in human cadence and speech.
That didn’t work. “When it came back, I feel like it felt like… you can feel like it was a human being turned into beeps and boops,” Schwartz says.
So they went back to the drawing board, eventually settling on a human making “beeps and boops” sounds into a synthesizer. Thanks in part to this process, BB-8 continued to sound like a droid, while also having all the “person” of personality.
But while BB-8 doesn’t have specific lines in the final cut of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Schwartz revealed that somewhere out there, on some Lucasfilm hard drive, sits a version of Star Wars: The Force Awakens edited to a very different BB-8, one with a human voice.
“I was told by the editors that all the dialogue that I did for the film was used while they edited. So, if Rey, Daisy Ridley’s character, is having a scene with BB-8, they would edit with my dialogue in there to know when to cut to back and stuff like that.”
Hearing those improvised lines in context just became my number one most desired special feature for the Star Wars: The Force Awakens Blu-ray.
