[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. As part of our ongoing series, The Big Picture, spotlighting Oscar nominees who work behind the camera, we turn to Best Picture nominee, The Zone of Interest and its sound designer. The power of the film is as much about what you don't see and what you do hear. In the film, we meet Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig and their children, living a lovely home in a lovely home with a verdant garden. All that separates them from the concentration camp is a wall and wire.

Neither can stop the sounds of the atrocities occurring feet away. Thanks to the work of Oscar-nominated sound designer Johnnie Burn, the camp is always present. Gunshots echo while the kids splash in a pool. Dogs bark and people scream while Hedwig tends lovingly to her dahlias. Then there's this constant rumbling, a kind of menacing hum, which we come to realize is the horrifying noise of the crematorium.

This is just white noise to the family, who seem to go about their daily life unbothered by the sounds of genocide happening right outside their windows. Johnnie Burn did diligent historical research for his work on this film. He has been quite busy. He was a sound designer for Poor Things, which is also up for best picture of the year, and he joins me now. Johnnie, welcome to the show.

Johnnie Burn: Alison, hi. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Very pleased to have you. Listeners, we want you to be aware that some of the sounds you'll hear in this conversation might be disturbing, so please take care in listening. Johnnie, when the idea of this film was first sent to you, what questions did you have before agreeing to come aboard?

Johnnie Burn: Well, I've known the director for 25 years or so, and I guess, question-wise, it was probably, how on earth are we going to reproduce sound that doesn't exist and do it faithfully with respect to the victims and survivors and how important will that sound be for the film? Because at the time we weren't really quite sure. We knew, Jonathan, the director, knew that he didn't want to go inside the camp and visually show the atrocities, so we knew that sound would be an important part of it but we ended up in quite a full soundscape place with it in the end.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned that you've known Jonathan Glazer for 25 years. How did you meet?

Johnnie Burn: Well, just a long time ago, I started working on him with commercials and pop promos. Uncle Rabbit in the Headlights video was the first thing we did together. Then a Guinness surfer commercial that was quite well known in England for the amazing visuals of a man surfing with horses. Jonathan invited me to help him out with his feature film Birth and following that Under the Skin, which was about 10 years ago, which was a real adventure for us in understanding how we like to do sound in film.

Alison Stewart: I have to imagine on a film like this, there's got to be a lot of trust and a lot of communication with the director. What is something that he does as a director that really helped you do your job?

Johnnie Burn: Well, when he-- Jonathan likes to work together. The post-production process, which is obviously, once you've got the film in the can and you start stitching it together, that was about a year and a half really. Most of those days, I'd see Jonathan and we'd work together on some scenes and I'd do some work for half a day without him, but very much the whole film was a constant calibration of not wanting to sensationalize or step over a line or anything. What does he do? He helps me do it together. That's what he does.

Alison Stewart: He's a collaborator it sounds like.

Johnnie Burn: Yes, he's an excellent collaborator. Yes, totally. I think probably most importantly, he trusts me to-- I think it was quite a big leap of faith for a 24 films and for Jonathan and for everyone involved to go through the process of filming what's essentially a nice visual story of a family having a reasonably good time and leave the whole-- actually, making the film work until post-production and leave that all up to the the role of the sound. I think I know that on the shoot, some of the Polish crew members were asking Jonathan when he was going to film the bad stuff kind of thing. Obviously, that wasn't going to happen.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting. What kind of research did you do to have a better understanding of the sound that you needed to, to your point, create?

Johnnie Burn: Well, I had to make sure that all of the birds and the bees were correct for the seasons and make sure that the motorbikes passing on the road outside are kind of period correct and that kind of thing, but by far the bulk of it was reading witness testimony and it was reading novels that exist on the subjects of time in Auschwitz and also we had access to the Auschwitz Memorial Museum Archive which was a great resource and it was really just reading anything that sometimes things would be sort of alluded to as a specific sound.

Like the sound of the electric fence, people would remember and recount, but a lot of it was incidences of torture or punishment or murder, where sound wasn't specifically mentioned, but obviously, these things would have sound attributed to it. I had to go through the process of making notes of hundreds of different scenarios and then figuring out how to reconstruct the sound of that out of whatever I could that is available today, basically.

Alison Stewart: You've created, I understand you had a list of hundreds of sounds.

Johnnie Burn: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What are some of the examples of things that you had listed?

Johnnie Burn: The block 11 was about 80 yards away and that was the execution block where during that time people about 80 to 90 people would be murdered by gunshot alone. For that, we made sure that we recorded the guns at the correct distance and with the correct actual weapon. Things like that. There was a rollcall every morning at 4:30 in summer and 5:30 in winter and that would have a sound attributed to it and an incidence that just very near to the garden often the prisoners would be whipped and they would have to count out the number of blows they were given up to 26 blows, and if they lost their count, then they'd start again at the beginning.

Just so many awful things like that but, yes, I had to become an expert in all of that because the process of making the film was, we saw it as two different films. One film that you see, and the other film that you only hear. In the process of making the final film, we made the family drama without hearing any of the sounds of the camp. The first year we didn't put any of the horoscope on, we just concentrated on making the family life of the Höss family work in terms of picture and sound and then it was only latterly that we put the horoscope on. Yes, that was the process.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Johnnie Burn, sound designer for The Zone of Interest. He is nominated for Best Sound in this year's Academy Awards. Let's listen to an example where you can hear the noises in the background. In this scene, which has no dialogue, Rudolf Höss, the Commandant at Auschwitz, is standing in his backyard, smoking a cigarette and messing with a faucet at the family's pool. Let's listen.

[playing a scene from The Zone of Interest]

Alison Stewart: Johnnie, what was the goal of that particular moment for you as a sound designer?

Johnnie Burn: Well, that's an awful moment in the film where he stands in his garden at night listening to the sounds of the gas chamber and the crematoria at work. The main goal was to be respectful of the victims and of that moment in time and really not to sensationalize it, but to understand that we needed to recreate it in order for the film to work and in order to therefore, to be there with the wider message that I hope people receive from the film. Yes, ultimately it was to the goal was to not sensationalize that and be as subtle as possible, really, which I hope we achieved.

Alison Stewart: We got a text from someone that says, The Zone of Interest holds the viewer listener from beginning to end, so uniquely presenting how the Nazis live their lives, choosing to be blind, deaf, and dumb to the atrocities they were committing. Someone just wanted to send that in. Thank you so much for the text. My guest is Johnnie Burn sound designer for The Zone of Interest. We'll have more after a quick break.

This is All Of It. You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Johnnie Burn. He is nominated for Best Sound for an Academy Award for The Zone of Interest. It is a film that follows the life of Auschwitz Commandant, Rudolf Höss and his family as they live next door to Auschwitz living their lives while atrocities are going on just over the wall and the fence. Johnnie, to these characters, these sounds just seem like white noise.

They don't even seem to notice at all. There's a scene where the wife, Hedwig has the baby, and she's walking the baby around the garden saying, "Oh, look at the pretty flowers." We just hear this noise in the background. What is a scene where you really wanted to play up that juxtaposition, between what we are seeing and what we are hearing?

Johnnie Burn: Yes, just after that when Hedwig has a conversation with her mother at the end of the garden about how Rudolph calls her the queen of Auschwitz. After that, we hear the sound of someone being beaten and we cut to some flowers and some bees humming around those flowers. The film almost grinds to a halt in a fourth-wall moment. Yes, that's probably the strongest part of making the most of the understanding of their ignorance, their willful ignorance.

I think that obviously, the point is the baby and the dog, I think, they are aware of what's going on and we well know that you can shut your eyes, but you can't shut your ears. They choose to dial it out, I guess, in the same way, that if you bought an apartment next to a really busy road, on the first night you slept there, you might find it really difficult to sleep, but a few months in, you'd be ignoring it. It's an uber version of that where they're choosing to absolutely ignore something because it suits them to do so.

Alison Stewart: Oh, you just blew my mind. That's why the baby cries in the movie all the time.

Johnnie Burn: It does, isn't it?

Alison Stewart: The baby's crying the whole movie.

Johnnie Burn: Yes, and it's funny when they were filming it, in order to make the piece feel very observational, it was simultaneously, the scenes were all happening at the same time. A take might be like one hour long and Rudolph would be in the office talking to the [unintelligible 00:13:14] and executives about building a new, more efficient crematoria. Hedwig would be in the kitchen with her friends and Elfryda, the maid would be upstairs with the baby wandering around.

All of these things actually happened at the same time. All the cameras were hidden and all the microphones, so the crew were pretty much absent and the actors all could feel like they were in 1943. That was how the baby dealt with it basically. Yes, you're right. It's the baby, the dog, and the grandmother are the ones who have more conscience.

Alison Stewart: Throughout the movie, there's a hum, this low rumbling that you really can escape, and it takes a moment before, as we're watching you realize that this is happening. Let's hear a little bit two of the kids are talking in bed and everybody listen really closely for the hum underneath, and we can talk about it on the other side.

[kids' voice in the film, The Zone of Interest]

Alison Stewart: Johnnie as we watch a movie, we come to realize this is the hum of the crematorium. How did you start to think about what it would sound like and how to make this sound?

Johnnie Burn: Well, I did go and listen to crematoria and obviously, the technology was very different to what it is now. The genesis of that sound was actually, I was working on a note and just finishing a film two years ago. Jon was just starting the picture edit, and I had a few days spare and Jon sent me the one shot that you just played of the boy in the bunk making that noise.

I decided with a fireplace and some cardboard and tubes and a microphone to make a rhythm out of a flame thing that mimicked the sound that he was making, so that then we could retrospectively make it sound like he had been mimicking what he was hearing out the window, which was the crematorium making that noise. I made that and made it led up so it sounded bigger. It sat there for a few months on that scene in the film.

It wasn't actually until many months later that we came to the conclusion that in order to display the accurate scale of the place and that this was a constant problem that they had in their terms that it really needed to be a constant thing. I think the first time you're really aware of that's what it is, is the shock when you go away to the riverbank and it's all nice and quiet and it's the same when you come back to the camp that you suddenly realize that that's what you've been hearing all along, basically. It's pretty horrifying.

Alison Stewart: When you're thinking about all of the different sounds that you need to create, whether it's a gunshot or dog bark, or a human voice, a human scream. You, as a sound designer, do you think about what's actually happening in that moment that that's a person? Do you have a story for that scream? Do you have a story for that dog? Why that dog's barking?

Johnnie Burn: Unfortunately I do, yes. All of it is really carefully placed and scientific in the approach in terms of the distances involved and how things would sound and super accurate in terms of Jon and I choosing different scenarios that were actual events that happened and to place them outside the windows of the house like the boy listening at the window to his father murdering someone for stealing apples. Yes, it's absolutely everything we felt had to be I suppose a piece of history because that's the only way to respectfully do it. We didn't want to make stuff up.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to another short clip. The visual on this, it's a close-up shot of a Nazi's profile, and this is what we hear in the background. There's steam in the air, and it seems like a train may have just arrived at Auschwitz. This is from The Zone of Interest.

[screams of people from the film, The Zone of Interest]

Alison Stewart: Johnnie, did you all use actors for those sounds? Are those actors in a recording booth?

Johnnie Burn: Yes, there's some not-in recording booths all outside. As much as possible we try and recreate, but a lot of the sounds, what we didn't want to do was get actors in a booth and say, "Pretend this is happening to you," because it just felt disrespectful and on such a documentary feel film, we thought that wouldn't warrant a good result. What my team and I did was we traveled around Europe because the people who were unloaded from all the various trains came from different destinations in Europe.

For example, a lot of what you are hearing there because we knew at that particular time around Rudolf Höss' birthday in 1943, there were many French trains arriving, and there was a riot in Paris during the period of our filmmaking. My team and I went over there and mingled in the riot and recorded the sounds of people in pain and shouting and things like that. That's why it's so effective because it's credible because it's weird, but when if you start it's quite hard to make a pain sound.

There's a big difference between someone pretending to be killed and actually happening kind of thing. Understanding what all that is and how the voice changed in those scenarios and what adrenaline does to things really was a bit of a study that, unfortunately, I had to do as well. [chuckles] So yes, for the most part, it's real sound, and that's why it's pretty awful.

That's about 30 minutes into the film, and up to that point, you've been hearing ambient sounds that are similar to that and suggesting that, and it's all slightly occluded and you're not entirely sure if you just heard the baby cry again or a train hoot or someone screaming in pain in the camp. Obviously, here, this is the one moment in the film where it's super expositional. There's no doubt about what's going on, kind of thing.

Alison Stewart: Johnnie, how did you take care of yourself and your mental health while working on this project and immersing yourself in such difficult subject matter?

Johnnie Burn: I took two months off to mix Poor Things. It was brilliant.

[laughter]

Johnnie Burn: Fortunately, I did. That was the catharsis I needed. If it hadn't been for that, oh gosh, I'd be in a sorry state, I'm sure. Poor Things was so amusing. I think the process of making the film with Jonathan and Paul, the editor, and Mika Levy, the composer, and everyone else on my team, is one of just doing the job. We've worked on many things together, but certainly, there were days when I felt, "I'm just going to stop now. I can't."

It's difficult because normally working on a film, you can work on a scene and then feel a sense of pride and think, "That's really good. Yes, we've done that. That's great," but you can't do that on this film because you just stop working on it and think, "Okay, ugh."

Alison Stewart: Have you been able to see the film with an audience, Johnnie?

Johnnie Burn: I saw it at the Cannes Premiere, and it was astounding because my experience of working on films is that you make it for yourself and the director, and you're doing something that you like or it's the way you want it and you forget that anyone's ever going to watch it. Then the next day you are there with 2,000 people in the world's press and everyone's watching something that you've had on your laptop and being privately doing and thinking, "Yes, that's it." It's quite stressful.

Afterwards, there was quite a stunned silence throughout the credits. Normally, you feel a crowd really react during a movie. I remember really pointedly thinking, "Gosh." I could hear a pin drop the whole way through the film, and I thought, "Gosh, it hasn't gone down very well," but obviously, it was quite the opposite.

Alison Stewart: Johnnie Burn is a sound designer for The Zone of Interest, he is nominated for an Oscar for best sound. Johnnie, thank you so much for joining us, explaining your process. Have a wonderful evening running between the Poor Things and Zone of Interest table.

[laughter]

Johnnie Burn: Yay. Thank you, Alison. I will do. Looking forward to it. Thank you for your interest.

Alison Stewart: Take care.

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