The sound designer for ‘Zone of Interest’ explains his 600-page bible of Auschwitz sounds
Johnnie Burn, Oscar nominated for his work, says everything you hear has a ‘legacy of truth in it’
Johnnie Burn, the Oscar-nominated sound designer for Zone of Interest. Photo by Kevin Scanlon
By PJ Grisar January 26, 2024
Sound designer Johnnie Burn has worked with director Jonathan Glazer for over two decades on projects like Guinness ads, the supernatural thriller Birth (2004) and the sci-fi horror Under the Skin (2013). Years ago when Glazer told him his next film would be set at Auschwitz, it came as a shock.
“It surprised the hell out of me,” Burn said over Zoom from his home studio in Brighton, England. Then, Glazer told him that sound would be the way the film would depict the mass murder of millions. Hearing that, Burn was scared.
But it worked out. The Zone of Interest, whose picturesque portrait of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’ life on the border of the death camp is constantly undercut by a soundtrack of industrial murder, is nominated for five Oscars. Burn is a first-time nominee for sound.
Burn gained acclaim for his work on Under the Skin, which followed an alien’s predatory journey through Scotland, and Jordan Peele’s Nope, another extraterrestrial creature feature, and worked on a number of Yorgos Lanthimos films, most recently Poor Things, but no project had been quite so absorbing as Zone of Interest.
His process included years of research and compiling a 600-page “bible” of what could be heard in and around the camp — from the birds on the Sola river to what the electric fence sounded like when a prisoner committed suicide on it. Fidelity to the actual events was pivotal. The distant, and nearly unintelligible, voices that form the film’s soundscape include quotes from survivor testimony from incidents like the Sonderkommando revolt and attempted escapes by prisoners. Each gunshot was carefully mapped onto where it would be coming from in the Auschwitz complex.
“Everything you hear has a kind of legacy of truth in it,” Burn said.
I spoke with Burn about his process, the meaning of the ever-present rumble of the film and the tentative promise of a Jonathan Glazer comedy. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I think you had said somewhere that there were basically two different films — one was just completely sonic and one was filmed.
Yeah, [Jonathan Glazer] said there’s two films, “I’m gonna go and film the family drama. And whilst I’m doing that, I want you to go and collect all the sounds that you need, and figure out what that is.” A huge responsibility on two levels. One: you know, to make the film work, and two to act responsibly and do it respectfully.
I read that you had a 600-page “bible” for the sounds. What did that look like?
The first half of it is witness testimony, anything to do with references of sounds of Auschwitz — the music of the camp orchestra, the songs they played. Recounting hearing the cries they would hear at night.
And then part two was what to record, which was alphabetized. And it had a section all about things like the guns, which were First World War guns, because they didn’t want to waste the good weaponry away from the frontline. There’s a whole section documenting the nature of the area, what the villagers in Oświęcim would have transport-wise, which was more horse and cart than anything with an engine.
And then a large section about sounds that we would hear from prisoners and very much in consult with a map that I made, where the different nationalities of prisoners were, so that I could correctly and rather scientifically geolocate [them]. So if it was a French voice, it was coming from a certain block. The executions were block 11, and so that was 150 meters away. It was a list of different nationalities interspersed with quotes, so that I could understand what to record people saying. More than anything [the bible] was so, when Jon asked me to put sound to the film, I could be quite accurate about confidently suggesting what may have been heard at any point of time or day or any season, and, and where they were in the camp or garden and what would be heard from that position.
The actors are not reacting to any of the sounds — that’s basically the point. Were they aware of what would be done and the ambient noise, or was that not something that factored into their performance?
I know that they were certainly aware. And I know that Jon said to me during the shoot, sometimes the Polish crew would say, “When are you gonna film the bad stuff?” Like, “Are you forgetting something?” The script never actually mentioned specifically, “we now hear this,” or any particular items, but it did say in it “we will, throughout this film, hear the sounds of the camp.” It certainly wasn’t anything to dwell on or the point of it. The experience that Jon and I had, moving from logically theoreticizing about placing the sound on the film, and then actually hearing it, was such an enormous leap and phenomenally sort of disturbing and powerful. And Sandra [Hüller, who plays Hedwig Höss] told me recently that the first time she saw the film, she was absolutely floored about how powerful it was because of the presence in the sound, and it was beyond what she could have imagined.
Because even the Hedwig trying on that fur coat, we know how horrific that is because of how she got it. But then punctuating it is that distant gunshot, and she of course doesn’t flinch.
Or when they’re lying in bed a bit later after that. And she sort of ignores all the gunshots and then stops, because she hears the child upstairs. That’s something that we don’t even really pick up on. It’s so filtered.
How did you source the sound? Were you finding military collectors?
Often on a film set you’ll see a 1940s Jeep, and it will have a Honda engine. You have to dig quite deep sometimes to find things that actually sound [period accurate], but there are people who collect these things, and quite often they like whiskey and that sort of stuff. So it’s not really hard. For the guns, we went to lengths to recreate the correct acoustic of what we heard there. There were in that period 80 executions a day by gunshot alone, and they tended to be in volleys of six, and they were at a specific distance. So, we’ve recreated that environment as much as we could and recorded that.
One thing Jon was quite clear with me about, he said, “I don’t want you to go and stand in a booth with a bunch of actors and say, ‘let’s pretend this is happening to us,’” because he said, “A. it’s disrespectful and B. it’s never gonna sound right.” And he’s absolutely right.
For the kind of vocal stuff, it was as far as possible, to repurpose sound from the real world that we could capture. There was a riot in Paris about pension reform. So we, unfortunately, said, “Great, let’s get on the Eurostar.” And we went over there just to hear the sound of young French men shouting in an abstract way. We went to parks in Germany where people were playing football. We just went basically all around Europe to the nationalities that we needed. And we tried as best we could over a long period of time to find what we needed to hear. And a lot of that stuff quite interestingly happens at night, where society breaks down more. And fortunately, there are less cars around so there’s not the traffic noise. That was the bulk of how it was captured.
What was the hardest sound for you to get? One thing that comes to mind for me, and this might not be the hardest thing, but there’s this sort of omnipresent rumble.
The rumble we kind of referred to as the soil of the camp. We understood how people will kind of infer the sound or understand it, but it’s the machinery. The textile machines and the armament machine. The first shot that I worked on was Jon sent me the picture of Hans, the young boy sitting on the bunk bed at night. And he’s making that mimicking sound of something he can hear outside the window. And this is very early on during the picture edit and Jon said, “I need something that he’s hearing.” So I made, with flames in my house and a tube and a fan and stuff, a sound that followed his rhythm. I made it into like a 15 minute thing. And that was a few months into Jon’s picture edit period. And he tried out on a scene or two and remarked that it had transformed the film because it made the juxtaposition constant. That was sort of a really powerful thing. And then we sort of developed it by adding in other sounds so that it wasn’t specifically so signature-y crematoria.
Certainly the hardest thing to work on was the bit where Rudolf stands at night listening to that sound and the sound of people being gassed. For the most part, working on something for two years, you find ways of dealing with stuff like that, knowing that you have a task at hand and to joke about things so that you can keep your sort of head about you. But yeah, not with that one! That was not enjoyable and difficult and, and fraught, because for the most part people screaming sounds fake once you actually put it in the environment of needing to sound fatal. So getting that right, and having to constantly address whether or not it was right, and then having to sort of, in quotes, like it, and all of that was horrible.
Were you on the grounds? I know that the set was near it, and they filmed inside the museum a little bit, too.
My team were there for filming, but I was bedridden sick for about two and a half months, the whole of that summer. And so I was not there at that point. But it was vital to be at the soil and to understand the geography of the place. It was certainly hugely important for Jon to film there. Recording on the set, we did loads of tests for ages beforehand about how to pick up not just the dialogue, which is what you’d normally aim to get from a film set, but the sound of people in the house. Jon was like “I’m not so interested in what they’re saying, it’s that they’re there kind of thing.”
Theaters are getting very excited about atmospheric sound systems and speaker setups. Does this come with instructions for the projectionist about anything like that? And how do you feel about the Dolby system and think about it in terms of how your work is presented?
We did do a mix of it that was very flying around the room and a lot of Atmos — Dolby Atmos is the sort of premier format. We had planes going overhead and hearing gunshots behind us and trains around us. But we dialed that down, because we felt that it sensationalized and it was unnecessary. And the immersion came from the material itself and the credibility in the sound that we were using, and not glamorizing the use of it, or fetishizing it in any way.
You did Nope and Under the Skin too, two movies about aliens and Poor Things, which has quite a different sensibility. How does this compare to everything else?
With aliens, it’s easier, because you can make up the sound because no one really knows what they sound like. So that’s fine. And with this, there’s this huge responsibility to respect the victims. All I wanted to do is create a space to educate and reflect. The immersion and the kind of emotional toll on all of that is, it felt like a completely different undertaking. This was more about understanding the sound of Auschwitz and it was about making a film for me, whereas the others have all been about. “Let’s make this sound really good.” I’ve never done anything that I didn’t want to sound good.
It was the horriblest film I’ve ever worked on and none of us enjoyed it. But we’re really glad we made it. Jon’s promised a comedy for the next one.
I want to see a Jonathan Glazer comedy.
I know! So do I.
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