YAK-YAK IS WAY MARTIANS COMMUNICATE

By Henry Sheehan (The Orange County Register)

From The Seattle Times, 12.27.1996, Final Edition

Few things in life are as calculated as movie making, and when the movie in question is a big-budget sci-fi outing, the planning can get meticulous indeed.

But there's room for accidents, thank heavens, as some of the back story of Mars Attacks! shows. One of the movie's signal effects is the way the invading Martians talk. Hostile-looking, 3 feet high and fat-headed, the little geezers say only "yak-yak," though they do so in a variety of tones. The relatively scant vocabulary provides the movie with plenty of joke opportunities--including misleading translations into English--and also reinforces the movie's theme that life is full of the inexplicable. But director Tim Burton and his collaborators arrived at "yak-yak" in a roundabout way.

The whole process started because executives at the movie's studio, Warner Bros., thought the original script was too long.

"There was one script version where we wrote their dialogue into it," Burton recalled recently. "It was great. Then we took it out because the studio said it was too long." Cut out all the Martian dialogue, you see, and automatically the script shrinks.

But that led to a problem when the storyboards were ready. Storyboards are comic-booklike panel drawings that visualize the script, and Burton wanted to make a temporary soundtrack to go along with them.

"We did a storyboard reel using a cheap tape recorder--and we don't even remember who did it--someone just did yak-yak, yak-yak' when it came time for the Martians to speak. And we never, ever, ever were able to duplicate it again. You know, you get the sound guys in there, and they're all Academy Award winners or whatever, and they're asking, How do you want the Martians to sound?' Like this.' Yeah, but this is a big movie, not some cheap production.' And they'd try this and that, and we even brought some people in to recreate the original, and in the end we just used it. Because no matter what we tried, it was like an actor who had already found his voice; that was it."

Ironically, at this point the executives reentered the scene, asking for old deletions to be restored. But by that time, Burton thought everything had fallen into place. "The studio asked, Can't you put subtitles under them?"' he says. "And I said, No, the point is, that there are things we don't know, and we don't know what they're saying. We think that they're reacting to things that we react to sometimes, but just when you think you understand them, you still don't."