Jonathan Glazer’s haunting film The Zone of Interest is mainly set in and around a 1937 house that belongs to the Höss family. The children run around upstairs as matriarch Hedwig tends to their idyllic garden. On the other side of this picture-perfect house is Auschwitz: the death camp overseen by Rudolf Höss. While what happens on the other side of the wall is never explicitly shone, its sinister nature lingers in each room through the jarring sounds of atrocity.

Offscreen Central had the opportunity to talk to sound designer Johnnie Burn about creating those unheard sounds, using sound to ignite the human imagination, and the responsibility of taking on this subject matter.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hi Johnnie, nice to meet you.
Johnnie Burn: Nice to meet you, Jillian.

Jillian Chilingerian: I’m glad that we’re able to chat about The Zone of Interest. I saw it last month, and the sounds have not left my brain.
Johnnie Burn: Works its way in there, doesn’t it? It’s all about creating a feeling in someone’s space. Glad that worked.

Jillian Chilingerian: The sound is a driving force within this narrative. When you get the script and you see what Jonathan has put on the page, how do you approach that figuring out exactly what you need to create that aura of the very domestic life and the horrors on the other side of the wall?
Johnnie Burn: It’s a tricky one, I mean, that you’re reading the script and certainly, I thought, Oh, my goodness, this film uses sound and the responsibility to kind of deliver a film that will go all the way through filming it, and post-production. The responsibility of the subject matter and thinking, wow, you know, need to get this right, so that was all about research and understanding what happened in reading witness testimony and having a library of sound, Jon said to me, we never will go inside the camp. The script didn’t define how we would use sound particularly, it was not in the script, we we now have this or we now hear that. Jon and I spent a year in post editing together the film as we described it, which is the family drama, and that was all very pleasant. It’s quite a nice film before we put sound on it.

Jillian Chilingerian: The cameras are capturing everything as it’s going, so when you’re in that sound mix, whether it’s the kid outside or Hedwig with friends at the table or Rudolph in his own thing you’re receiving all of this sound. What is it like to structure that?
Johnnie Burn: Jon wanted to create credibility and believe that you really are experiencing the house and so much of that was the fact that multiple scenes were filmed at the same time, so you really would have Hedwig in the kitchen talking with her friends and Rudolph was with IG Farben guys, and the boy was upstairs banging the drum and the baby. All those things were happening and 10 different cameras were picking up, but there were also 20 different microphones, and they were positioned very carefully to collect all of that. So the process of sound was one part, following the action around the house to be in the room, but also very much to say, well, this other thing is still going on. It’s that constancy that immerses you in their house and also takes away from multiple camera angles. The sound gives a constant flow through that. That’s just what makes it feel so credible and so overwhelmingly alarming that it is so mundane and normal, and you do hear someone banging a drum next door, and, you do hear the baby crying, and, yet, all of those layers of detail of sound are juxtaposed against this horrific thing. We wanted to capture that family in normalcy as much as possible and to make that as credible as possible.

Jillian Chilingerian: Watching them just go on with their lives, it’s very disorienting. How did you map out the time of the day when things would be happening in the camps of the gunshots with machinery? I love how you mentioned the responsibility of not going like, Oh, we’re gonna go over the edge to let you know how intense this was.
Johnnie Burn: Very carefully. I spent a year researching and many more months with the team recording sounds and making a library so that we put together the edit of the film. It was very much just playing the film through from the beginning each time and choosing moments where people were not reacting to sound and putting it in, but what I presented Jon with the original idea was there’s stuff in Auschwitz, and at the camp at in the house, and I will, during that time, make 24 hours of outfits and a cycle of time off, and so I put together this thing that was like, Well, we know that the bell rang at 6 am and, and we knew that executions would start at a particular point in the day. Scientifically was how we approached it really, because a lot of it was also about the physicality of how things were heard, so the guns that alluded to the 80 executions a day in volleys are six shots we recorded at the correct distance. We put them in at the times of day when we knew those kinds of things happen. So it was always right, here’s a scene where are we? What time of day is it? We’re in this part of the garden? What prisoners were in that block, that’s nearest to where we are now, so what nationality of voice would we hear?

Jillian Chilingerian: I could not imagine having to dive into that and figure that out, but I think it adds to the immersion of the film of how it feels if you were there and the authenticity is captured within those moments.
Johnnie Burn: We went through it, Jon and I, 10 times and the first pass probably took about a month and a half, two months or something. This was just putting on the sounds of a camp and then the next pass was like a couple of weeks, the next pass was a week, and the next pass was a few days. Each one of those passes was putting things in and then towards the end of that process, each one of those passes was taking things out and realizing, for Jon, his filmmaking process is about getting an emotion to the audience, delivering a feeling, basically to people. Once we’ve achieved that feeling, the process of making the film is then what can we remove, but still get that feeling? The more simple things are, the less adorned and frills there are, generally the better basically, particularly with subject matter like this.

Jillian Chilingerian: Almost like the family with our ears, we can kind of become accustomed to sound over time. How did you approach that almost being a possibility when people are watching it?
Johnnie Burn: It is a possibility. When we were mixing it, we would replay it and if we played it from halfway through the film, then everything would sound far too loud. So we had to every time we wanted to gauge how the film was working, and the volumes at which we should have stuff, we had to play it through from the front every time because naturally your brain focuses on what it sees as important information and the rest it suppresses. So we had to kind of counteract that natural phenomenon that we all have.

Jillian Chilingerian: It’s interesting of how you maintain that, it’s almost like you’re hearing it for the first time as we’re going through. When Hedwig’s mother visits, it is almost like it breaks into us as the audience like, we’re we’re witnessing it, but it’s like almost she’s representing us up like she can’t believe that they are going on with their lives. There’s almost a shift in how she is interpreting the sound versus like her daughter and the family.
Johnnie Burn: Yeah, it’s extraordinary that she’s the first person who comes along and sort of says what we all know, which is you can shut your eyes, but you can’t shut your ears. I suppose the dog and the baby before them. Before that point in the film as we were just saying, you can get to the point where we were finding we only had to very subtly intonate a particular sound to make the point. Whereas when she comes along, it served us well to make the odd bit of some more obvious because by that point, as a viewer, you are switching off a little bit. With her particularly looking differently, but maybe the sounds were a bit louder. Certainly, the scene at the end of the garden is kind of extraordinary and how the journey from her and the conversation about the Queen of Auschwitz, we end up on the flowers, which, which was a sort of extraordinary editorial departure that we kind of made in the final mixing room, the whole sequence of the flowers going into the red only came on to the film in the last few weeks.

Jillian Chilingerian: Those are moments of trusting and tapping into the audience to use their imagination and connect it with sound. When you’re going through this process was that ever a conversation of thinking about how people would interpret, and interpret sounds with their own imagination from the audience’s perspective?
Johnnie Burn: Yeah, absolutely. I think that was the whole thing and certainly. Jon said, we all have seen pictures of the Holocaust, and I have no interest in recreating any of that. It is all about during the whole film, what it does is draw upon your mental imagery and that sound of that picture joining your head is probably more horrific than any Jon could have shown you anyway. We know that sound is more of a hotwire to the limbic system and the eyes because you control the eyes more easily than the ear. I do wonder how it plays to a 14-year-old who has not had this indoctrination, but I would hope that it would encourage them to understand that there is something here and this is important enough that I should seek it out. We’re drawing pictures in your head based on stuff, we know that it’s already in there.

Jillian Chilingerian: With this subject matter, we often see films go extreme, and the way both you and Jonathan crafted this together to make it such an immersive experience of horror, but also just such a timely film that is just unlike anything I‘ve ever seen.
Johnnie Burn: I’m lucky that I went to work with Jon, he cares about sound so much, and he understands that people don’t tend to use sound in such a kind of strong narrative way. So yeah, I feel blessed to work with him.

The Zone of Interest is currently in select theaters and expanding throughout the month of January.
You can read our review of The Zone of Interest here.