Oscar-Winning ‘Zone of Interest’ Sound Designer Breaks Down ‘Ethical Approach’ to Recreating Chilling Noises of Auschwitz

Sound designer Johnnie Burn — a newly-minted Oscar winner for his acclaimed work on “The Zone of Interest” — has detailed the thorough and deeply considered process that went into recreating the sounds of Auschwitz for Jonathan Glazer‘s Holocaust drama.

With the film telling the real-life story of German SS officer Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who raised their children in a farmhouse next door to the Nazi death camp, the horrifying sounds heard from across the wall provide much of the film’s chilling impact. Taking into account the historical context, Burn — speaking at the BFI London Film Festival on Thursday at an event sponsored by Variety — explained that a very “ethical approach” was taken, saying that it was “very important not to sensationalize” anything and “to be respectful” throughout the process.

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Glazer’s initial concept of using sound “to suggest” the industrial-scale mass murder taking place was the main “ethical choice,” Burn said, but he added that both he and the director were adamant that they wouldn’t simply “get a bunch people to pretend this atrocity or murder was happening to them — because that didn’t seem right.”

Instead, Burn wanted to “go out into the real world and find situations where people were in pain or suffering and attempt to record that and use it so that the context of what you’re looking at on the screen would deliver the feeling.”

With that in mind, he went to the riots that took place for work and pension reform in Paris in 2022, which he said “gave a good source of French-sounding prisoners,” and attended lower-league football matches in rural Germany “where young German men were shouting in aggressive accents.”

He added: “You’re never really hearing the words that are spoken, but there was something interest about recording natural world sounds — it felt a lot better than trying to restate that stuff.”

Alongside his collaborations with Glazer, which date back to his first feature, 2013’s “Under the Skin,” Burn has worked across several of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films, and provided the sound design for his multi-Oscar nominated “Poor Things.” For Lanthimos’ next feature “Bugonia,” Burn gave a hint to the curious approach the filmmaker had when it came to the music, again being scored by Jerskin Fendrix, who also worked on “Poor Things.”

Fendrix, he said, wrote and recored the “entire score” for “Bugonia” working from a “three-word brief,” with the crew and cast “not allowed to tell him anything about the script.” As for the film, Burn said he recently watched a cut and thought it was “incredible,” adding that “the final scene was extraordinary.”