On ‘The Zone of Interest’ and the Painful Act of Listening

A few years ago, while deep into production on Jordan Peele’s Nope, sound designer Johnnie Burn flew home to Brighton for a family emergency. Before settling down, he took a call from Jonathan Glazer, the filmmaker with whom he has shared his longest-standing collaboration. Glazer told Burn that he was about to start a picture edit for The Zone of Interest (2023) – a film set just outside the walls of Auschwitz – and needed a sound for the crematorium. For their first feature film since Under the Skin (2013), Glazer wanted the evocation of the camp’s horrors to be left almost solely to Burn’s recordings and a score by British experimental musician – and fellow Under the Skin alumni – Mica Levi. ‘There’s the film you see and the film you hear’, Burn explained to me on a recent Zoom from LA. ‘When I read the script, I thought: Jesus, for the sound to carry off the intent of the film – its juxtapositions and responsibility to history – how do you respectfully reproduce the sound of mass murder?’

Based on a 2014 novel by the late Martin Amis (the writer died less than 24 hours before the film’s premier in Cannes), The Zone of Interest concerns the lives of Auschwitz’s longest-serving camp commandant, Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). The film is set in 1943, around the time when Romani gypsies and Hungarian jews were being brought to the camp by the tens of thousands, and Höss was tasked with finding the most expedient way to murder them. Aside from one or two meetings and correspondences, little of this is explained in the film and almost nothing is seen – least of all by Hedwig, whose newfound affluence (in one revolting sequence, she’s seen trying on a, presumably dead, woman’s coat) is predicated on how efficiently she can turn a blind eye. It is less about the banality of evil than the human capacity to just get used to it.

To recreate the sound of the crematorium, Burn put a microphone in the chimney above his fireplace, using cardboard to manipulate the rhythm. ‘I started adding footsteps of people we’d recorded on production and the sounds of textile and armament machines’, he explained. ‘That sound – the machine of death, the soil of the place – became a shorthand. It subverted the need for sensationalization.’ Glazer started using Burn’s recording incidentally before deciding to keep it as a constant background rumble. The noises are guttural, near primordial, and seem to play in the characters’ subconscious; the sounds of sporadic gunshots during lunch, or distant screams while the Höss children are tucked into bed, are made all the more chilling by how little they respond to them. To achieve this dissonance, Glazer had the family drama filmed first, using multiple cameras throughout the house so that the actors never knew which they were playing to, and only added the camp sounds in post-production. ‘It was very much a case of making it as credible as possible – an immersion into the everyday mundanity and humdrumness of real family life.’

For the shoot, Glazer was given permission to film outside the camp but chose not to use the Höss home – which still stands – instead, building it afresh, as it would have looked at the time. The results are uncanny, a tacit denial of historical distance that Burn responds to in his sound design. ‘It needed to feel like a found document, one with no patina or sepia edge. I think the most direct way to connect with people is to say: “look at this, this is real, it could be now.”’ To create the library of sounds, Burn researched for over a year – interviewing survivors, scouring the Auschwitz archive and reading whatever literature he could find.

‘I was looking at anything that referenced sound. In witness testimonies, for example, I learned there was a roll call with a bugle, people also said that the electric fence was audible, it had a kind of buzz and rattle to it.’ Working from this information, Burn recreated the sound of a person using the fence to attempt suicide but chose to cut it out. ‘I felt the responsibility of not sensationalizing anything. I was also aware that we were painting pictures in people’s heads based on the collective knowledge we all have.’ Like Amis’s novel, Glazer’s approach was to strip back wherever possible. This is clear from the opening scene – or lack thereof – when Mica Levi’s warped and thunderous overture plays over an entirely black screen, which suddenly gives way to a bucolic image of the Höss family picnicking by a lake. ‘Mica’s huge descent and then the birdsong, what a way into a film. The unintended consequence was that it also said: “use your ears”.’

Burn’s efforts have not gone unrecognized: having won technical prizes at Cannes and the European Film Awards, Burn will attend the industry’s shiniest galas in the coming months. Earlier this week, The Zone of Interest picked up five Oscar nominations, including Best Film, Best Director, and for Burn and production sound mixer Tarn Willers, Best Sound. Hüller will likely be in attendance after receiving a Best Actress nomination for her performance in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023). In interviews, Hüller has spoken openly about not wanting to understand Hedwig – a first in the actress’s long career. With barely a single closeup, the film keeps its distance, too. Did Burn’s proximity to the narrative weigh on him? ‘Certainly. I mean, you have a job to do, you find a pragmatic way, but then you’re working on a particular scene, a year in, and you suddenly pop out and say, “oh my god, what are we doing here?”’

Elsewhere in the world, genocides continue to happen in the vicinity of ordinary lives. The doom scroll has replaced the rumble. Was Burn ever daunted by the enormity of it all? ‘Horrifically so. Under the Skin was such an immersive experience, but when John presented me with The Zone of Interest it was next level. Frankly, I was looking for the door but the story needs to be told.’ 

_{Main image: Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest, 2023, film still. Courtesy: A24}