The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023).
When you start to really hear a movie, you’ll never be able to unhear it. The sound designer, like the cinematographer, is an artist disguised as a technician, a wielder of microphones and mixers whose deepest desire is to serve a cinematic vision. Sound design usually stays in the shadows, but sometimes a film comes along that really makes you listen: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) is one of those films. Its soundscapes are intense, involving, and essential to our narrative comprehension of the film; this is sound design as storytelling, as counterpoint, as argument.
The artist in disguise behind The Zone of Interest is Johnnie Burn, a British sound designer who, over the past decade, has carved a reputation as the ear of new auteur cinema. Through longstanding collaborations with Glazer and Yorgos Lanthimos (Burn is also behind the surreal soundscapes of Poor Things [2023]), plus standout contributions to Trey Edward Shults’s Waves (2019), Francis Lee’s Ammonite (2020), and Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), Burn has established himself as the first choice for filmmakers who care as much about how their films sounds as how they look. Now his work on Glazer’s latest has landed Burn his first Oscar nomination (shared with Tarn Willers) for Best Sound.
A rigorous study of the banality of evil, The Zone of Interest unfolds mostly within a house on the grounds of the Auschwitz concentration camp where Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) lives in bucolic peace with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their children. In interviews, Glazer has spoken about not wanting to reenact atrocities, with the attendant ethical risk of rendering such horrors as perverse entertainment. Instead he has talked about making two films, “the one you see and the one you hear.” In The Zone of Interest, we do not see inside the camp; this horror is conveyed via a relentless grinding, an indistinct hum coming from just beyond the Hösses’ garden wall, within which we can occasionally discern gunshots and human cries.
Effectively, it’s Burn’s job to produce that second film, the one we hear, which discordantly plays alongside otherwise benign images. This layering creates unsettling cognitive dissonance; our eyes see tranquil domesticity, our ears hear horror, our mind fills in the blanks. This approach, which Glazer describes as “ears first,” is established in the film’s opening moments: a black screen plunges the viewer into darkness for over a minute, accompanied only by composer Mica Levi’s hellish, swirling prelude. With nothing to look at, our ears search for sense but find only dread and panic.
During preproduction, Burn embarked on a year of archival research, building a bank of sounds. Fine details—knowing that the camp’s guns were old because modern weapons were sent to the front, for instance—were crucial. Acquiring old machines or finding ways to approximate them was important, but even more vital was finding a way to evoke the sounds of the people living, and suffering, within the camp’s walls. After experimenting with actors (“awfully hammy”), Burn eventually found the sounds he needed in the real world. The vocal samples in The Zone of Interest include snippets harvested from the streets of Berlin at 3 a.m., from outside of hospital emergency departments, and from riots in Paris. After principal photography concluded, Burn spent another extended period in close collaboration with Glazer, Levi, and editor Paul Watts as the film took shape in postproduction. The result of this process is an unusually complex soundscape, bookended by Levi’s eerie music.
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013).
That four-way collaboration between Watts, Levi, Burn, and Glazer was established while working on Under the Skin (2013), Burn’s first film as head of sound. Glazer’s road-movie/sci-fi/horror experiment casts Scarlett Johansson as a man-eating alien driving a van around the gray streets of Glasgow, picking up real Glaswegians, non-actors filmed with hidden cameras, as prey. For this hybrid creature Burn developed a fittingly chimerical working process, borrowing techniques from documentary to gather a library of sounds and then working closely with Levi to develop that alien soundscape: a wash of buzzing strings, manipulated street sound, and ambiguous drones. Glazer’s storytelling is opaque and fragmented, echoing the dislocation of Johansson’s protagonist, but Burn and Levi’s soundtrack connects those disparate pieces—the sci-fi imagery, inky fantasy sequences, documentary-style footage, and bleak Scottish landscapes—drawing the viewer through the sparse story.
Under the Skin was a breakthrough for Burn, bringing him to the attention of both Yorgos Lanthimos and Jordan Peele. An invitation to work on The Lobster (2015) kicked off a series of collaborations, and Burn has worked on every Lanthimos film since. Although Glazer and Lanthimos are very different directors, both are driven by a perfectionist obsession with detail. Although Burn describes The Favourite (2018) as a film in which the sound is not especially conspicuous, rewatching with attuned ears reveals the layers that go into creating convincing audio. The Favourite unfolds in a clattering, rattling world of empty corridors and gusty rooms. The palace is opulently alienating, chilly, and claustrophobic, despite its size. The clink of jewelry and swish of skirts are subliminal reminders of gendered social expectations, evoking the rigid hierarchies that confine the female characters. The sounds of the courtiers are brittle and metallic (chinking metal, well-heeled feet on polished wood) while lower-status characters are associated with wetter sounds (bubbling saucepans, squelching mud). The squeaking of rabbits is central to the unsettling final shot, and ducks also play a prominent role (one early idea was to include a laugh track of quacks). In the mix, Burn blurs the boundaries between the film’s harpsichord-heavy chamber score and atmospheric sound, adding a level of uncanny modernity to otherwise familiar classical music. Burn’s work is about more than augmentation; it tells us about the characters and draws out key themes.
If working on a period piece like The Zone of Interest or The Favourite is about recreation, then fantasy projects are about invention. Poor Things, which follows the adventures of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a corpse reanimated by an eccentric scientist, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), takes place in a steampunk vision of the nineteenth century. There were no real locations to record, as the film was shot entirely in a studio, so Burn worked instead with found sounds: a horse and cart is accompanied by the sounds of a steam-powered machine, a cruise ship engine by human heartbeats, and Godwin’s digestion by churning test tubes (“We had to understand: would it be really annoying to just hear bubbling the whole time when you're trying to listen to the words?”). Combined with Jerskin Fendrix’s score, which explores how wind instruments rely on the interplay of both natural breath and mechanically drawn air, Burn’s work blurs divides between animal and machine. Fittingly for a film about stitched together creatures, the soundscape is itself a Frankenstein’s monster, a disarming fusion of the mechanical and organic.
I spoke to Burn before the Oscar nominations were announced, but it was already clear that this current wave of success has brought him to a new career peak. We fit in two interviews around his schedule, the first over the phone from a noisy Heathrow departure lounge as Burn set off to Los Angeles for a flurry of awards-season events, the second from his home office in Brighton.
The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018).
NOTEBOOK: Sound design is a niche area of the industry, and you don’t come from a film background. How did you find your way into this kind of work?
JOHNNIE BURN: I always loved music. I grew up in welfare housing, and things were not affordable, but what I did absolutely love was the digital sampling equipment and synthesizers which were coming out. When I was in my teen years, it was a boom time for electronic music equipment. I would spend all my money going to Soho and going around music shops.
Weirdly, I ended up doing a business degree at City University in London. I would spend most of my time yawning and looking out the window. I had this weird thing where I left an Evian bottle running under a tap, when I went out for a run … and when I came back it exploded. It made me profoundly deaf for about twenty minutes, and I thought that I had lost my hearing. I remember going up to my bedroom, I must have been about nineteen years old. And I was putting my hands on the speakers and realizing that I couldn’t hear anything… I just decided there and then to quit university, and I went and got an apprenticeship at a recording studio in Soho. I worked there for about ten years, and that was my intro. They had this machine called a Synclavier. Every evening at 6 p.m. when the studio closed, this extraordinary piece of kit that Michael Jackson had made Thriller on was mine as long as I could stay awake. I didn't know until that point that my hobby was something you could get paid for.
Through that route, I met Jonathan Glazer, who is a not-half-bad director! He said to me, around 2002, “I'm gonna do a film one day, and you’re gonna do the sound for me. Can you figure out what you need to know, the difference between a 30-second TV commercial to movies?” That's how I got into movies.
NOTEBOOK: How did that professional relationship in advertising lead you into films?
BURN: I worked with Jonathan at this company, [then] I ended up leaving to set up my own business. One of the first things we did together was a Guinness commercial, which is quite well known, with a surfer who goes out to sea and swims amongst horses. We also worked together on the video for UNKLE [featuring Thom Yorke], “Rabbit in Your Headlights,” with a man walking through a tunnel constantly being run over by cars. Jon was very forward-thinking, really one of the first people to include real sound outside of the artist’s music in a pop video.
I’ve done all of Jon’s work for the last 25 years or something, so I’m very lucky. What’s been extraordinary for me is that I was always absolutely in sound [but] what Jon gave me access to was an extraordinary world of film. I was never a cinephile growing up, but because Jon is such a hands-on director, I’ve spent probably about three years in total nonstop, joined together, sitting in a room with one of the best directors of our time, with him constantly telling me what he likes about various different films, or why the sound that we're working on works with that shot. That was my film school, really.
NOTEBOOK: The first feature film you worked on with Glazer on was Birth [2004].
BURN: To be honest, I didn’t really know what I was doing with film at all. For the rough mix of Birth Jonathan said, “You’re gonna be the head of sound for this,” and I was like, “Great!” You do something called a temp mix when you are about two months in; you throw it together the best you can and do a screening. [James Bond producer] Barbara Broccoli—she was one of the ten people there—stood up mid-screening and said, “Stop! I cannot watch this anymore!” Because I’d mixed it like a TV commercial. It was super loud and horrible. I actually got fired from Birth, but ultimately Jon hired me back on because he said to the producers, “This guy’s great. I can’t finish the film without him.” But it wasn’t so much a baptism of fire, more of a drowning in fire.
So Birth came and went, and I did a lot of great work on it, but I wasn’t the head of sound or the sound designer. And then, about four years before Under the Skin, Jon said, “By the way, I’ve got another film coming. You are definitely doing it. So you have to figure out exactly what you didn’t know, because we’re not going through that again.” So I did a couple of terrible movies which I’m really glad no one ever sees, bottom-dwelling things which I happened to find out about through someone. But they really helped me understand how to tell a story through sound.
NOTEBOOK: What was it that you had to learn?
BURN: It was twofold. One was the connections, knowing the right people to do the other teamwork things that we need—like foley, which is a whole big area of film that you don’t really do in commercial [work]. But more so, that sound can be such a powerful tool and have so much more to say than just the narrative of what you're saying. It can be juxtaposition and counterpoint. In a commercial you want to have things very clearly there and as loud as possible, an impactful call to action. In a film, you can play a sound which an hour later will appear again later. I had to learn how to use it in a “sound design” kind of way.
People use sound design in different ways. Sound design can mean music, this kind of score which can often be a bit more atonal. And sound designer can also mean the guy who is hired specifically to do the helicopter sounds or the spaceship. The way I tend to use it is more holistic. You’re the person in charge of how the whole aspect of sound is recorded, and how it is used narratively and to emotionally convey the whole narrative of the film from beginning to end, and also how that is presented to the audience.
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013).
NOTEBOOK: Then came Under the Skin, which was a real breakthrough, in that it allowed you and Glazer to establish your technique.
BURN: I’m still really in love with the whole process and experience of that movie. It was extraordinary. It was really about discovering with Jon a way of recording sound in the real world and repurposing that documentary sound. We spent weeks on the streets of Glasgow. We had this microphone that we had in the handle of an umbrella, a directional pointy thing, so we cut the handle and stuck one of those in. It meant that we could pretend that we were just standing there with an umbrella, and you could stretch your arm out and when someone was walking past, we could point this microphone two feet from their face while they were talking and record exactly what they were saying. That’s the bulk of where sound came from, many hours hanging out on Sauchiehall Street with people screaming and shouting.
What that ended up giving us was a really warts-and-all soundscape. All that unusual stuff in the soundscape, the bits we only got because we were out in the street… That’s the bit that gave that extra dimension, the things that your brain usually filters out and Hollywood sound editors find extraneous, so filter out in the sound mix. Approaching the world in a different way was the challenge there. And because it was the first film that I was head of sound on, it was just enormously enjoyable, spending a year with Jon in this little room in Soho putting it together. I mean, I was shattered by the end of it. It was one of the first things that occurred to me when I was asked to do The Zone of Interest… I don’t know how I’ll do that without dying!
NOTEBOOK: What’s that working process like? How does a Jonathan Glazer film come together?
BURN: Jon has a workshop in Camden, and [editor] Paul Watts sits in one room, Mica [Levi, the composer] sits in another room, and I sit in another room because I live in Brighton; I’m actually virtual. I have a screen and an open microphone that’s on every day all day, so whenever I play my work in Brighton it also comes out on a screen and a pair of speakers in [my] room [in Camden]. So Mica comes in to have a look at what I’m up to, and we speak about it, and that basically goes on for about a year. Jon wanders between different rooms with more or less focus on different days depending on where the cut and thrust of the film needs to be.
Jon absolutely doesn't use temp score, or anything like that. For him it's very much about putting the film together, rigidly, formally, and making it work without any Band-Aids. And then the process with Mica and the score is not to underscore or belabor the beats or emotions that we already know; it's to find more truth to the film and write some form of counter-narrative. Mica will play something, and Jon and I will sit there and listen to it and say, “That’s amazing. Do that.” And then I’ll say, “Okay, well, if that's the case, then you know, this fridge hum should be that pitch because it carries mood across. And you know, now I think that that person talking— their voice is too aggressive, so we should ameliorate that.“
NOTEBOOK: Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest put an unusual emphasis on sound, in a way that has been widely commented on by critics.
BURN: Unlike many directors, Jonathan is really, really aware of the dimension of sound, [that it can be] such a huge tool in the armory of a filmmaker. Often sound is seen as secondary; it augments, or it makes the thing not sound like a film set, or whatever. Jon knows it’s a layer, and it tends to be the side from which we need the truth more than we do for pictures. You can fool the eye much easier than you can fool the ear. In Jon’s films the sound will always have something to say beyond what you’re looking at. I think because sound is so cheap to capture, compared to pictures, people sort of overlook it. But if you’re presented with something which is an image and sound, you tend to believe the sound. It’s hugely powerful.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017).
NOTEBOOK: It sounds like a very distinctive process. How does working with Glazer compare to working with someone like Yorgos Lanthimos?
BURN: Yorgos doesn’t ever give me a brief—I should be so lucky! He just says, “You’re the sound guy. Just do it.” That’s the brief. But it's more that there's an inherent brief. When you work with Yorgos, he hires you because you understand the films he wants to make, because he trusts and believes in you. Then he creates an environment where you're free to do whatever you want to and experiment within that.
Yorgos saw Under the Skin,and he really liked it. I worked with him on The Lobster, and then he got The Killing of a Sacred Deer [2017] greenlit. That was pivotal for our working relationship, because we got to the point in the process where Yorgos had pretty much edited the feature, which is when traditionally you head over to the sound department for three or four months of sound work. At that precise point, Yorgos said to me, “I'm really sorry, but Olivia Colman has just come free, and I can now go film The Favourite, so I'm going to have to leave you to it.” And you know, that was about it: “You’re going to have to do the sound for The Killing of a Sacred Deer on your own.” He pretty much said, “I'll see it at Cannes.”
It was really frightening. I remember I had never been so nervous in my life. Because I’d made all these decisions, and thrown them in the film, and now I was playing it to Yorgos in front of 3,000 of the world’s press. So that was really hair-raising! And then after, in the bar, I said, “So, did you like it?” And he said, “No, not really, but we can fix it.” But when it boiled down to it,he did [like it] actually; there was only so much that needed to change.
He forced me to start thinking more like a filmmaker. As a sound designer, you think, “I can make amazing sounds,” and you try and stuff them all in the film. But when the director leaves you to it, you stop saying “Do you like A, B, or C?” You start thinking, right, what is the only thing that would really work on this scene? What’s the film trying to say? Once you start thinking about it more clearly, there is only one right choice. It really fundamentally helped me to learn more about how to make film sound, and so for the subsequent films, like The Favourite and Poor Things, Yorgos has said, “You know what you’re doing, play me it when you’re ready.”
Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023).
NOTEBOOK: The Favourite and Poor Things are interesting to compare. They’re both period films, but The Favourite is very much set in one real location, while Poor Things is on a studio set.
BURN: With The Favourite, Yorgos did the first draft of the picture, then we went [to Hatfield House] and reenacted every single shot. Every time anyone walked down a corridor on The Favourite, what you’re hearing was me in size ten stilettos, or one of my team in boots. We spent a couple of days recording every single door. It was amazing going in and realizing that when you walk into the room of such an old house, everything rattles. That was one of those fortuitous discoveries that you wouldn't get [otherwise] because you'd never sit in front of a sound effects database back in Soho or Hollywood and choose to put rattling pots and timber into a film like that.
Poor Things was the first set build for Yorgos, so there wasn’t a location which I could visit to strip of sound. There were not actually any real-world locations, so the process of making the sound was to go and record things in the real world, and then manipulate them so that they sound unusual, or to repurpose them. For instance, the ship's engine was a heartbeat, because the ship looks really unusual, so putting on the chug of a dull diesel engine would have made it more boring than it looks. Finding a slightly unusual sound for it, something with more character, but still subtle, was key to creating the world.
NOTEBOOK: Again with Poor Things, you’re also working with a really distinctive composer, Jerskin Fendrix. Symbiotic relationships with composers such as Levi and Fendrix seem to be quite central to your work, given that sound design often seems to cross over into music and vice versa.
BURN: Again, it’s quite an unusual process. Many composers work by being sent the film, and they’re asked to underscore the emotion that they’re looking at, and write some music to go with that. But Yorgos doesn’t want to do that at all; he sees that as a way to create something that you would already expect. So Jerskin wrote the entire score before it was even shot, and then Yorgos, along with the picture editor, put that to the film—and somehow, miraculously, it works.
The version I saw [first] already had the music on, which was brilliant because the instrumentation is so singular and specific. It really caused me to have a rethink of what I had imagined, and I made my work more spare and singular to suit. I'm not a musician, but I really understand music and music production, so I enjoy making sound design which is commensurate with score, and which will carry on pitch and tone and rhythm and things across scenes so that everything dovetails together nicely, like having bespoke cupboards fitted.
It's something that came up, actually, when I first met Jordan Peele [to work on Nope]. He was saying that was the bit that really excited him. He first called me, and he was like, “I think I need to understand what you do. Talk me through what you did on Under the Skin. I really need to understand how you can make a soundscape sympathetic to a musical score, how you can make it all work.”
Nope (Jordan Peele, 2022).
NOTEBOOK: Nope presented another challenge, because you had to build this unseen, alien creature.
BURN: Nope, more than any other film I’ve worked on, was about placing you in the middle of a soundscape, in the movie theater, and understanding that small disturbances can become quite unnerving. Whereas originally, I thought it was gonna be about creating the sound of a monster, it ended up being more about creating the sound that the monster made within the environment—the disturbance in the environment, which became a lot more freaky to the viewer. I spent quite a bit of time outside in the desert of Santa Clarita, California, where it was filmed, understanding what it felt like when a gust of wind blew down the valley and you heard the bushes move… That’s quite scary! It was about making the hairs on the back of your neck tingle by manipulating the natural environment to sound just a little bit odd, but not so odd that it wasn’t believable.
For the monster, we got a bunch of very talented actors and asked them to scream like they're on a roller coaster having fun. Then when we dropped a hat, they suddenly had to make that become not fun anymore. And we mixed around with the difference between the fun screams and pain screams. I also spent a bit of time around the Six Flags amusement park recording from a distance people on roller coasters screaming, because that has a really unusual drift in the air. Then it was also about blending that with just the sound of a whistling wind, so you weren’t sure if you were just hearing wind or just the sound of people screaming.
It was so much fun working on Nope because it was a film which used sound really well to describe what you can’t see. That gives you great creative license. I think it's just really powerful for mental imagery, because the images in your head are going to be more scary than the ones that we can give you, because they’re personal.