Words by Joe Williams

For the casual viewer, the use of sound design may not immediately stand out as the crucial filmmaking element that it is. For over a decade, however, Johnnie Burn has been changing that.

His most recent work is The Zone of Interest; an extraordinary yet intensely challenging film about the Holocaust which more or less relies solely on sound to convey the unfathomable horrors occurring over the wall in Auschwitz. As Johnnie explains, director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth, Under the Skin) and his team crafted the ‘Best Picture’ nominated film in two parts. The first half plays out effectively as a family drama — “Nazis in the Big Brother house” — where we watch the daily life of the Hoss family living in their middle-class house which literally shares a wall with the concentration camp that Rudolph Hoss presides over.

The second half is all about the sound. It is through Johnnie’s extensive research and work, layered over and woven throughout the picture, that the reality of what’s happening reaches us. The last time Johnnie collaborated with Jonathan Glazer was over a decade ago, on Under the Skin; another film that heavily utilised its soundscape, this time to immerse the viewers in the point of view of an alien experiencing humanity for the first time.

It was because of his stunning work on Under the Skin that director Jordan Peele sought Johnnie out to design the sounds of his expansive horror sci-fi, Nope. Then there’s Poor Things — Yorgos Lanthimos’ Victorian-set phantasia that is competing with Zone for ‘Best Picture’ this year — which also uses Johnnie’s sound work to enrich and distinguish its self-contained universe. Looking at his resume, it’s clear that he has forged himself a reputation for working with incredible auteurs and visionary directors.

Building up a unique soundscape is central to his job — but so too is working with film scores and composers. In fact, despite the seemingly obvious cross-over, the extent of which sound design informs and is shaped by soundtracks, and vice versa, is astonishing. Speaking to Johnnie, who heads the prestigious and award-winning Wave Studios, it becomes clear just how inextricable the two are.

To what extent does your job see you in contact with composers and their scores?

For me, it's as much as possible. It tends to be that the projects I work on are ones where the soundscape is going to be doing something interesting. Therefore, I'll always say to the director, it's really important that I have communication with the composer. It's so important for me to make the soundscape reflect the score — it's a cousin of the music. I try to make everything sound like an album; I’m aiming for that level of production. Whether it's sound design or music taking the lead in a scene is often open to debate, and it can very much be done either way, so you'll quite often both be trying to grab the same branch. That’s why discussing with the composer, where you are least aware of what each other's thoughts are on how a scene might work, can be incredibly helpful.

If you're working on a film, and you're just given a score near the end of the production, you don't have a lot of time to make suggestions. What you might be suggesting as the sound designer could be fundamental to the whole way the score works. Effectively, it'll be too late, and you're better off not even saying it. But if you get in there early, it’s completely different. For example, the comedic moment where the frog gets squashed in Poor Things is something that Jerskin landed a brilliant comedy musical beat on — but I politely said, “How about if we did it this way”, and showed him it with the score taken off, and then you could hear the frog making that gasping, breathing noise that suggested, firstly, that it hadn't been killed, which is funny, and secondly —  it was just a funny noise. Then we moved his music to after that, so it was the reaction of Emma Stone’s character. So, if you can have those conversations early on, then it can set out some really good, broad strategies that allow people to not tread on each other's toes.

What do you try to achieve with your sound design?

I like to make sure that in my work I’m using natural sounds to inject an emotional narrative. To do that, I'll try and find harmony or a pitch or a rhythm in real sound. Then I'll exaggerate that to carry on the tones, the rumbles — and it needs to all be in the key of the score, because, otherwise, it sounds all jangly. Figuring that out is important.

Do you go on set and record sound, or is your work completely reserved for the post-production process?

No, I very much like to be on set or location. I see myself in the sound designer role as someone in charge of understanding how the sound is recorded, how it's used in the film and how it's presented in the cinema afterwards. I'm not the actual on-set sound recordist — that's an enormous skill set that I simply don't have. But what is crucial to me is getting the sound from the set or the real-world location, because you can capture the anomalies and the weirdness. You go and get things that you wouldn't have expected to get. If you just sit there in post-production and type “cityscape” into a sound effects library, then you're not going to find anything that is going to give you creative input.

What I tend to do is wait till about halfway through the shoot, and then turn up, go and see the picture editor, and the VFX people, and discuss what they're imagining — because that's useful too. I'll look at the dailies and then go and visit the locations that they've already filmed in, when it’s nice and quiet without the catering trucks etc, and get some real recordings of real life in those places. It’s in doing that you get the kind of weird things that make the viewer watch the final film and think, “Oh, this is quite real and believable.” It stops it being a film that is a veneer and becomes more of a natural immersion.

What are the conversations you have with a director while the sound and score are being put together?

So, with Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things), for example, we have a very streamlined workflow. At the beginning of the picture edit, I would have already spent a couple of months with my team recording various sounds and generating a library that we would use for that film. I always also give that to the picture editor, on any film I work on — then I know that the picture editor is gonna be drawing upon fresh sounds, and not just using stock sounds, and I'm not going to be stuck with something that someone loves in the rough cut that proves quite hard to get out. Yorgos, he goes further than that and keeps me updated on the picture edit. So I'm seeing the cut as it progresses. He’ll say, “You just put anything you like in the film, and I'll only let you know when I don't like it.” So with any given scene, I'll send the picture editor a few files with timecode references and say, “Can you throw this in?” And I'll only hear about it if it gets thrown back.

With Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest, Under the Skin), it’s much different; it's more about discovering it with him and trying all those adventures together. But he likes to do that all during the picture, edit as well as in pre-production.

Then, with Jordan Peele on Nope, we spent probably six months before filming began just discussing how all the sounds and music would work. The first script I read, I got in October 2020, and I thought, “Oh my God, this is amazing. It really uses sound.” He was already, you know, fully aware that sound was going to be an important part of that story. Then I gave him back a list of suggestions of how to use sound in a more, even more enhanced way. I had a whole complex idea for the beginning, for what sound “called” the horses out, during that shot of them standing in the valley, looking out at the sky, right at the start. Then, on Christmas Eve, I got another draft of the script back with literally all of my ideas in it. It was like a brilliant Christmas present because the script became even more ensconced with the idea of sound as a kind of narrative. The thing about Jordan Peele is that he's a very talented musician as well. He completely understands sound and can speak rather scarily well in terms of pitch and tone and frequency — in a way that I would rather directors sometimes didn’t! (Laughs).

How did you make the sounds of the people trapped inside the alien, Jean Jacket?

We gathered together a group of around 10 actors in a booth in Los Angeles, and we spent a few hours with them doing all sorts of things — “Pretend you're on a roller coaster!” And then when we dropped the hat, they’d give us painful screams instead. So that's a lot of what you hear when Jean Jacket flies over the house. I also hung out a lot, about a mile away from Six Flags amusement park, recording distant screams of people, which is a lot of what you hear, and you question: is it a roller coaster, or is it something more sinister?

I also took recordings of actual wind and put in sharp EQ spikes, so that a broad spectrum of white noise-type sound became more of a specific pitch, and then made sure that that pitch was the same pitch as the screams. So it would kind of blur the line between human screams and the wind.

How closely did you and the composer Michael Abels work together on Nope?

Very closely. I spent three months on the mixing stage at Universal, and there was a period near the beginning of it all when Michael would come in once a week, and I would play him what I was doing. He would go, “Okay, I get it, I get it.” Then we would leave space for each other, and he would bring his stuff in and I played that. I think it is an unusual process, but it was wonderful. Michael would ask, “Why doesn't everyone do this?”

Often, I think what happens is that a sound designer meets a big composer, and it's daunting. They're usually incredibly successful, and they have the right to put the music where they like. So, it's pretty hard to say, “Would you mind not scoring over this bit?” But I think it's really important for the film to be able to do that. So, having the opportunity for a sound designer to sit with the composer, and everyone express what their goals are, is hugely beneficial for a film — and Jordan knew that.

In terms of sonic storytelling, what tools do sound designers arm themselves with?

You know, like earlier in my career, I would always be trying to cram a film full of cool sounds, but now I realise that it's about thinking like a director. So wearing a director's hat is probably the number one tool; thinking of the wider picture. As part of my arsenal, I have a brilliant stereo shotgun mic that I take everywhere, it’s fantastic for recording atmospheres and spot effects and stuff like that. That affords me the ability, whenever I go near a film set — or, unfortunately for my family, on holiday — to record a bunch of new things that will always creatively inspire. Most importantly is to have a fresh library of sounds that I've curated and collected, specifically for that film. I think it's really important to live in the world of those sounds for a few weeks before you start trying to put them on the film.

I don't get so lost in that idea of crazy plugins being salvation for cool sound design. I think it's definitely all about really good recordings and how you use them. I used to think that was because I've never done a film that makes any sort of monster noises, so that’s why I didn't need to do that sort of thing. But even with Nope, all the noises tended to be just pure recordings of actual things. It wasn’t those software plugins that you see demos of on YouTube, where people speak into a mic and it growls like a dinosaur.

You’ve worked with Yorgos Lanthimos on The Lobster and The Favourite, but Poor Things marked the first project with an original score. How did that affect your collaboration together?

Hearing Jerskin’s score was monumental for me. I was so fucking delighted because Yorgos has been looking for a composer for years. Previously, he'd always have a bunch of music that he'd found that would be very important to him in terms of texture, and it would be up to me to wed all those things together and give a cohesive sound to the film and fill the gaps between the music. When he sent me Jerskin's album, Winterreise, a few years back, he was like “I think I found our guy.” And I just thought, “Bloody hell”, because it sounded like what Yorgos would make if he made music himself.

So hearing Jerskin’s score on Poor Things was revelatory for me because he'd taken it to such a sort of pure, refined level of finesse that it made me kind of revisit what I had imagined for the sound design, and think, “Okay, mine needs to be more singular too.” With his score added, there isn't any room for anything that could be indirect — it all had to be singular and on point.

Did it change the way you had previously worked together on building sound for a movie?

Yeah, definitely, but only in a good way and definitely for the benefit of the film. Ultimately, it took a lot of work off my plate because I always had to glue together disparate pieces of music and find a commonality in both the tonality of them and the mastering of them. It would be quasi-composition and sound design, engaged much more towards music than what I do now. So that would be an awful lot of to and fro with Yorgos to get that stuff right. Jerskin meant that I could concentrate on the role of sound design and not the role of a kind of music editor. It’s a phenomenal score, and I'm happy for Yorgos because he's found an enormous soulmate in the voice for his films. He really has.

You’ve worked on both Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest, both of which are directed by Jonathan Glazer and utilise sound heavily in their storytelling. Does a project that places so much emphasis on sound daunt you?

With The Zone of Interest, Jon said, “This one’s going to be tricky. This time we're doing Auschwitz, but we're never going to go inside the camp.” So, yeah, I was really daunted — I kind of panicked. Initially, I said, “ I'm not sure I can do this”, because the sheer physical labour of building the sound design and using the score for Under the Skin was so arduous. Couple that with the task of respectfully representing the Holocaust — all of that scared the hell out of me.

Of course, then I calmed down and got on with it. So with The Zone of Interest, it was all about extensively researching the Holocaust a year before filming. I needed to be an expert on the sounds of Auschwitz. It was really grim. I got depressed. The day after the Cannes premiere, I got viral meningitis and was in the hospital for a week, and after I told the doctor what I'd been up to, he was like, “Yeah, you're exhausted.”

Both The Zone of Interest and Under the Skin feature scores by Mica Levi. How did their score help shape those films?

So, we saw Zone as kind of two films, right: the family drama, which is like Nazis in the Big Brother house — “pleasant” scenes of people having a nice time in the Hoss family. Then there was the second film, which is the film that you hear. Mica's music was enormously informative, and they wrote an absolutely beautiful full score that in some way acted as a palliative support mechanism for watching these kinds of horrible people. But, when we came to the “second” film, where I brought in the sounds of the camp, Mica's score almost made it sound like a lie. It was as if this wonderful music was saying “This didn't happen.”

So we took most of it off, just leaving the camp sounds, and when we did a screening of that, everyone agreed that it was more powerful. In the end, we used Mica's score at the start as an overture — we felt, as humans, that we need music as a way of understanding, to prepare for the film, because it's such an intense immersion. In that new context, Mica’s music worked, but I hope that one day their full score sees the light of day, because they’re just so phenomenally talented.

When did you realise that sound was your calling?

When I went deaf. I was at uni doing a business study degree, and I was in the first term and very bored. One day, I was at home, and I stuck a water bottle under a tap to fill it up — and then I forgot about it... When I came back to it, an hour later, I guess it was something to do with the pressure or something, because it exploded, and within seconds, I couldn't hear a thing. I went upstairs to my bedroom, which was full of samplers, DJ equipment and record decks, and I remember feeling the speakers, and they were moving because they were playing, but I couldn't hear a thing. I started crying, because I thought, “Oh shit, I’ve killed my ears!” I looked around at my bedroom full of stuff, thinking “Well that's that hobby gone.”

Then, about 20 minutes later, my hearing slowly came back. A month after that, I quit uni and went and got a job in a recording studio in Soho, which worked in TV commercials, and it was amazing. They had this thing called a Synclavier, which was the preeminent sampling machine. And I found that if I stayed after the clients left at 6 pm, it was all mine to play with. So that's how I got into it. I slept at work for about a year and was in love with all the machinery and the idea that I could get paid to do what I was interested in.

Do you remember any moments of sound in film, or specific scores, that made an impression on you growing up?

I remember watching Blow Out with Brian De Palma, not even realising that someone did that job, you know, and thinking that that was incredible because the whole film is centred around sound. And then, of course, I was a Star Wars kid. What kid didn't go (making laser gun sounds) pew, pew, pew! The thing that comes to mind is John Williams’ melody for the Raiders of the Lost Ark. That was enormous for me; the experience of how fun music can be in the cinema

Are there any directors whose films utilise sound in such a way that you'd be excited to work with them?

I think it would have to be Benny Safdie. I met him at the Telluride Film Festival when he and Josh Safdie were test-checking Uncut Gems. He understands sound; he even boom-opped, Good Time.  So both Good Time and Uncut Gems are amazing in terms of how sound and music are all meshed together in a bold way. I think that's all Benny’s doing.  I'd love to work with him.

The Zone of Interest is showing in UK cinemas now.