Johnnie Burn: You Can Close Your Eyes but You Can’t Close Your Ears

Johnnie Burn is a sound designer whose impressive portfolio includes The Lobster, Under the Skin, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite, Nope, Poor Things, The Zone of Interest, and many other films. A sound designer’s job is to record, mix, and combine sounds and noises to create a soundscape that brings a film to life. For Burn’s outstanding work, he received an Oscar for Best Sound for the film The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer. This award is well deserved; Johnnie Burn elevates a necessary craft into an art form. The soundscape in The Zone of Interest tells the story of the Auschwitz concentration camp without ever showing it, as it echoes incessantly and unmistakably behind the concrete wall adjacent to an SS commander’s family garden. Unbearable screams permeate the film like cold ambient noise. Based on a true story, this film explores what it must have been like to look away and ignore cruelty. Burn meticulously researched and travelled the world to record all the sounds needed for the story. In this interview, the Oscar-winning sound designer shares what the work of a sound designer involves and the passion and sensitivity behind it.

AMELIE KAHL: Johnnie, as a sound designer, does sound affect you differently from others?

JOHNNIE BURN: Unfortunately, it does. I am always listening to the environment around me, which is intense, because sound has such an impact on your emotions. I travel a lot with my microphone. I’m pretty sure I annoy people by recording things all the time. I also notice sub-bass, for example, distant rumbling that others might not hear. The brain generally does a really good job of filtering out sounds that aren’t necessarily important to a person. My brain, however, doesn’t do that. I just hear everything. [laughs]

AK: You won an Oscar for best sound design. What, in your opinion, makes a good soundscape?

JB For me, it’s essential that sound is documented rather than artificially recreated. When you record something on-site, you find sounds that can’t be found in a mixing studio database – the strange sounds of a cityscape, for example. These authentic sounds make the human brain truly believe what it sees. I try to collect these sounds because an archive of sounds that are natural and realistic gives credibility, with all the ugliness that naturally comes with it. A Hollywood film might have a very clinical and overly precise soundscape. For me, that lacks the authenticity that the brain can perceive on a subconscious level; it lacks realism. At least, that’s how I see it.

AK: So, do you have an archive of recorded sounds?

JB: When creating a soundscape for a film, I don’t just turn to my sound library and type the sound I want into the search bar. I first go out into the real world and record things that are as close as possible to the sounds I need. I always make sure to record them in a documentary way, without sensationalising anything. I then take the recorded sounds to the studio and edit them cinematically into the film. So, every film I work on starts with a few weeks of field recordings. Each film includes a few thousand sounds; half of them are from my archive, and the other half is newly recorded.

AK: How long does it usually take to record the sounds for a film?

JB I am currently working on a film called Hamnet by Chloé Zhao. We spent about three weeks recording riverbanks and people. Overall, it has been around three months of sound recording. Afterwards, probably six months of editing and three months of mixing. In total, it tends to be about a year. 

AK: What was your initial reaction when Jonathan Glazer told you about his idea for the soundscape of Zone of Interest?

JB: I was terrified, frankly. When Jon told me about Zone of Interest, he mentioned that we were going to do a lot of the film through soundscapes. The realisation that I had to research and understand everything about the Auschwitz concentration camp was intimidating. Sorry, that may not be the answer you were looking for. On a more fundamental level, I was overwhelmed by the idea of telling so much of a story just through sound. Of course, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to tell such an incredibly powerful story through sound. Jon is an incredible director who understands that an image does one thing, and a soundscape tells another story. He really knows how to use sound.

AK: What were the first steps in working on the soundscape for Zone of Interest?

JB: I spent a few weeks reading all the Holocaust literature I could find. I researched testimonies and reports from survivors and guards. I immersed myself in this world as best I could. In the first few weeks, I couldn’t believe that I would have to do this every day for two years. But it was an honour and a privilege to be part of this journey and to deepen my understanding of it. Jonathan said, ‘I’m going to Poland to make this film, and when I come back in about six months, you have to be an expert on what the Auschwitz concentration camp sounded like in 1943.’ I wanted to be sure that I had done my absolute best to understand what was the best sound for that day, that time, and that year. If it was a human voice, I wanted to match it to a story I had read or an event that had happened.

AK: How exactly did you record sounds that sounded like the Auschwitz concentration camp next to a family home?

JB: Jon didn’t want a bunch of actors in a voice booth pretending or imitating sounds. So, it was about going out into the world for a year and a half, recording sound on location. The sounds of the guards, for example, were the sounds of drunk young men shouting in the streets of Germany at night. For the sounds of people screaming in pain, we went to Paris to record the riots, screams, and cries there. Essentially, it involved travelling around and recording people. Over time, we realised we didn’t need specific words to tell the story. A cry of pain from behind a wall in Auschwitz is enough for our brains to fill in the gaps. Jon and I listened to hundreds of recordings and marked those that could work as guards or prisoners. I used these sounds to create what we called ‘scenarios’. Then, using our research, we categorised them geographically and chronologically. For instance, the camp orchestra always played in the morning when they went out.

AK: How did you recreate the sound of devices that were used at the time?

JB: Most of the weapons available to the guards in the concentration camp were weapons from the First World War; newer weapons were used at the front. So, we found the right weapons and recorded them in rooms surrounded by concrete. Block 11, the execution block, was about a hundred metres away from the garden where the film is set. There were roughly 90 deaths a day from gunshots alone. So, we knew we had to integrate these sounds accordingly to make it all historically accurate. Everything was recorded as precisely as possible, at the right distance, and with similar acoustics. We researched the vehicles that would have passed by the house and recorded the sounds of those motorcycles and cars. Everything you hear in the film was specially recorded. It was an enormously long recording process.

AK: Does that also apply to sounds inside the house?

JB: Yes. We had a multi-camera setup and four different microphones in each room. It took many months to listen to all recordings within the house during filming. For example, if a baby was crying upstairs in a room, we wanted to keep that sound. This compilation of sounds makes the final product extremely realistic. On top of that, we layered sounds from outside the house. It was only in the last three months that we added the sounds of the concentration camp we had created. We pretty much completed the family drama with the sounds of Auschwitz.

AK: So, you essentially made two films?

JB: Jon described it exactly like that. He said there were two films: the film you see and the film you hear. Film one was the family drama that took place in the house, with an underlying soundscape of babies, dogs, children, laughter, maids, people doing laundry, and walking up and down the stairs. Film two was made in the final months of the post-production process – the subversion of the whole thing to make it as realistic as possible, which is to say, the sounds that the family would have heard from across the wall. From a distance, standing right where the house was, we could imagine what it must have sounded like. Those were the layers we had to add. Jon, I, and Mica Levi, the composer, discussed this process. But it was one thing to discuss the soundscape; seeing how the completed film worked in practice was a whole different story. It was horrifying and much more powerful than I had imagined. It was incredible how well it worked. You can close your eyes, but you can’t close your ears.

AK: What was the film you enjoyed working on the most?

JB: Under the Skin was so important to me. Before that, I did another film called Birth, but it didn’t go very well. Back then, I was only doing TV commercials, and so when Jon athan made me sound director, I didn’t really know what I was doing. After filming, he said, ‘Find out what it is that you were lacking because you’re going to be sound director again on another film.’ So, I tried to figure out what I would do differently next time. For me, it was about going to Scotland, where his next film was being shot, visiting the exact locations, and recording all my own sounds. I discovered that I liked using real sounds, mixing them, and telling a story with them. I was amazed at how powerful sound can be – it can tell a story and convey emotion or subtext. With Under the Skin, I discovered how I wanted to create sound. 

AK: Why weren’t you happy with your sound for the film Birth?

JB: It was so basic. I’d only mixed TV commercials before, and TV commercials in 2003 were just loud. The only thing you had to do in commercials was crank up the compressor and get the sound volume up. We did a test screening of Birth, and James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli came to watch it. About ten minutes in, she stood up and said, ‘Who mixed this? It’s terrible,’ and I got fired. [laughs] Later on, I was rehired as a sound designer, but not as head of sound anymore. I’d never thought about how a film needs to be put together, sound-wise. It hadn’t even occurred to me. I spent at least three years thinking, ‘I’m never going to work on a film again. I hate that world. It’s awful and dangerous, and there are dragons, and I don’t understand it,’ and then Jon came back and said, ‘You’re going to do another film.’

AK: What is bad sound design for you?

JB: If it’s not subtle enough. You can overdo a soundscape when you make a point too obvious. To me, it’s awful when an audience immediately thinks, ‘Yeah, I get it.’ For example, the ticking of a clock that is supposed to sound stressful. If you’re turning it up really loud, it’s so obvious. There could be a reason to do that; there are diagnostic sounds that are extraordinarily loud and unsubtle and that can be used as a stylistic device, but for the most part, that’s not the case. 

AK: Is there a sound you personally like?

JB: I really like the sound of cracking ice on a big lake. It has all sorts of layers and high pitches. I’m quite into that at the moment. The one I find most useful, though, is air, wind: natural, empty ambience. It’s a beautiful blank canvas. You might listen to it and think, ‘There isn’t anything there.’ But I keep a collection of different sounds of nothingness because, as soon as you hear it, it tells you so much on a subconscious level, like white noise rustling. Different winds have different natural tonalities and can make a film more or less distinct or more or less moody. It’s like having a collection of blank canvases, basically. It’s probably one of the most powerful things in sound.

As featured in SLEEK 82 – BALANCE. Available in print and digital here.