During a talk at the BFI London Film Festival, Johnnie Burn (The Lobster), who won an Oscar for his sound design in The Zone of Interest (2024), recently detailed his process of creating the soundscape for director Jonathan Glazer’s (Strasbourg 1518) Holocaust drama. Burn emphasized the importance of maintaining respectful approach while capturing the human sounds of Auschwitz, given the historical weight and emotional impact of the setting.
The Zone of Interest focuses on German SS officer Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his family, who lived beside Auschwitz. The film is roughly based on Martin Amis’ 2014 novel by the same name, and stars Christian Friedel (Babylon Berlin) and Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), who play parents in a family living with the sights and sounds of the camp, while Höss is stationed there as the commandant. For this reason, Burn produced the audio for the film with a keen awareness of the ethical challenges in this setting.
Much of the film’s atmosphere is created by sounds heard from the camp, but Burn and Glazer were committed to respecting the victims. Instead of reenacting or artificially reproducing the sounds of suffering, they captured and used field recordings to evoke the emotional weight of the atrocities. Burns captured audio at protests in Paris during 2022, and from football matches in rural Germany, where he felt the crowd’s aggression and intensity could match the disturbing backdrop without being overt. This aligned with Glazer’s concept of using sound to imply the horrors without being explicit, allowing viewers to feel the impact through implication.
By recording audio in the field from these unique sources, Burn’s demonstrates an imaginative way to avoid possibly inauthentic studio recordings to bring a vivid experience to audiences.
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