‘You Can Shut Your Eyes, but You Can’t Shut Your Ears’

The Zone of Interest is a Holocaust movie that only ever lingers on one victim of the Holocaust. (He’s a prisoner whose job is mixing ashes of the dead into a German commander’s garden soil.) It’s centered on the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, yet you never see a train, or a vicious dog, or a crying baby. Instead you mostly watch domestic scenes from a German commander’s family, as they eat, play, swim, and tend to the garden. This decision has led some critics to complain that the movie keeps the “horrors at an oblique remove,” as Manohla Dargis put it. But that’s true only of the visuals. Through the soundtrack, the horrors come alive in a whole new way.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, the film’s sound designer, Johnnie Burn—who is nominated for an Oscar along with the sound mixer, Tarn Willers—does a close analysis of key scenes in The Zone of Interest. Early on, Burn and the director, Jonathan Glazer, decided they would not use sounds from actors. Instead Burn collected real sounds from the streets of Europe and repurposed them for a soundscape of cruelty happening just out of view. The effect is to show how humans can indeed keep horrors at an oblique remove, even when they are surrounded by them. “You can shut your eyes, but you can’t shut your ears,” Burn says.

Listen to the conversation here:

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, which is up for Best Picture this weekend, is a film told in two different ways: There’s the movie you see—and the one you hear. The one you see involves a mother, a father, their five children, and their dog living an idyllic life in a big house with a big staff and a swimming pool and a lovely garden.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

But the film you hear—and only get faint glimpses of throughout—tells you what’s actually happening.

And just a warning: Some of the sounds you’ll hear in this episode are disturbing.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

The Zone of Interest is set in 1943. The house and the garden are surrounded by a high wall. And outside the wall—right outside the wall—is the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The father of this family, Rudolf Höss, who was a real person, oversees the camp. His wife, Hedwig, oversees the household and mostly tries to ignore the sounds coming from the camp. Which makes this movie, among other things, a testimony to how humans can ignore evil, even when it’s incredibly loud and close.

Johnnie Burn: I’ve known Jon for many years, and we’ve done a lot of working together, so we know kind of how we like to use sound, and it’s always an exploration, but I think Jon was pretty clear from the beginning that he didn’t want to show any of the violence, so we knew that sound was going to be the way of doing that. But where we ended up with it was a lot more comprehensively based in sound than we had imagined.

Rosin: This is Johnnie Burn. He helped sound-design The Zone of Interest, and he’s nominated for an Oscar.

Burn: The first month, I would say, of making that soundscape, we were really quite reserved, and we didn’t want to overdo anything. But it didn’t actually convey the industrial scale of what was being accomplished there by the Germans, and so it became imperative to make the whole soundscape a more constant presence, which obviously forces the juxtaposition in a much more claustrophobic way.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

So yeah, when he gave me the script, he said, You need to become an expert in how Auschwitz sounded in 1943 and to go and do your research, because I’ll be back in a year or so.

Rosin: Was the idea to avoid familiar images? Like if we saw striped uniforms, if we were looking at the human anguish, it would look familiar? Because you literally see none of the concentration camp. I mean, one time, you see a prisoner, and that’s the only visual we have.

Burn: Yeah, obviously I can’t speak for Jon, but I think that the point is, to me, what is the point in redoing something that has already been done? And we all have those images in our head. And I think Jon said he didn’t want to film a scene with loads of prisoners all pretending that they were having a bad time and then see them in the catering truck half an hour later. I think everything about Jon’s approach to filmmaking, to me, seems to be to try and get things as realistic as possible.

Rosin: So how did you do it? How do you actually figure that out or make it sound realistic?

Burn: Yeah, exactly, that was what I thought: How do I do this? Well, it involved an awful lot of reading, and the first few months were reading all the literature available. And we had access to the Auschwitz Memorial Museum archives, and basically reading anything that had an event where you could imagine that it made a sound.

So if someone spoke of someone being whipped, then I’d make a note of that and in great detail about how that was described as having happened. And the executions that were carried out at Block 11: There’s much detail on the ricochet of the buildings, how it sounded; the position of that from the garden where the film is set was about 60 yards, so it’s all these things I was making note of and building a map of how the place looked and where the different sounds came from.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

And basically then I had hundreds of pages of witness-testimony events that became sort of little radio plays, if you like, that I had to then go and find or reenact or somehow create sound that would represent those things that happened.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

And the process of doing that was to understand that to get actors to pretend that they’re in a gas chamber or whatever is not a good thing to do, so it was really about trying to find sound in the real world that is accurate and credible because it happened for real, and trying to repurpose that. So it was a long process of my team and I traveling around Europe to different places where people shout—you know, late-night city centers, things like that, and football matches, soccer matches in amateur league without big crowds, you know, those sort of things are just going to capture sounds that sounded right, and in the context of the film could be repurposed to trick you into believing you were hearing something horrific.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

Rosin: Wow, I would not have expected that, because … sorry, my brain is just catching up to what you’re saying, because what you’re saying is that having actors do it, which is what normally happens in a movie, is somehow morally compromised and more faked than collecting sounds from real people from totally different contexts, and somehow packaging them together to re-create a certain kind of sound. That’s not an obvious thing.

Burn: Well, there’s all sorts of horrific things that I learned about what people sound like when they’re actually dying and how to kind of represent. And unfortunately for a lot of actors—I don’t want to disparage the acting community—but it just sounds so much more credible to go out and record people shouting in a street where the acoustics are all correct and people are full of actual adrenaline than it is to stand in a booth and try to re-create an atrocity. And morally it felt like a no-go area, anyways.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

Rosin: Just give me one more example, because I’ve never heard this before, of how you would put together a sound, and then we’ll listen to some things, but things we wouldn’t have expected about how you collected a sound to create a horror. You can talk about a specific scene or a specific set of sounds or maybe shouting. Where did you get the shouting from?

Burn: Yeah, a lot of the arrivals on the trains that came in that particular period of time were from France. And one morning we woke up and were informed by the news that there was a riot in Paris, so some of my team got on a train and went over there with microphones, somewhat concealed, and just hung out in the streets there. So for example, some of the French shouting you hear is the sound of people in pain or being arrested, all kind of recorded at quite a distance.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

This was all on public display in front of TV cameras and stuff. But yeah, so French shouting was achieved in the Parisian work and pension riots last year. And another, the sound of the crematoria, there’s a scene where young Hans, the boy, is on the bed and his elder brother is above him looking at a prisoner’s gold teeth that have been taken, and he mimics the sound that he hears out the window.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

The boy kind of goes [mimics the sound of a chimney]. He’s basically mimicking the sound of a chimney, making a wind noise. That was just something that Paul Watts, the picture editor, had cleverly picked out as a great scene to use to describe: the sound of the crematoria that he was hearing out the window. But I think it was just an ad-lib by the boy during the long picture take. But that was the first scene that Jonathan gave to me and said, Can you make a sound of that? That was something that I just made at home with a roaring fire and some cardboard to attenuate the flames, and a tube and a microphone to get the kind of sound of wind going up a chimney.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

Rosin: There’s another scene similar to that where the boy, the older brother, locks his younger brother in the garden shed, and he makes another noise. Do you remember that one?

Burn: Hissing. Yeah, he makes a hissing noise. Sss.

Rosin: And that was meant to be the sound of … ?

Burn: Yeah, that’s him mimicking the gas chambers, and that’s the family they live in. But it’s infrequent during the film that it’s actually acknowledged that they do hear it, and that’s an obvious moment where undeniably they are aware of what’s going on. They just choose to block their ears, which as we all know is kind of impossible. You can shut your eyes, but you can’t shut your ears.

[Music]

Rosin: More with sound-designer Johnnie Burn after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: So I want to talk about one scene where the wife of the SS officer, Hedwig, is taking her own mother outside for a walk in the garden. And it’s an amazing garden. And her mother, the grandmother in the family, she’s just arrived, so she’s just trying to orient herself. She’s asking the obvious questions that in the family nobody says out loud, like, Where are the Jews? Is that the camp wall? Meanwhile, Hedwig keeps drawing her attention to all the splendor of her garden and the fine details. So she’s saying, Ignore that, those sounds. Pay attention, pay attention. And that’s a scene in which what’s happening before us and the sound design is speaking to each other in an incredible way.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

Burn: Yeah, the way we made that was obviously none of that sound was actually there that’s in the background. What there was was two women walking through a garden, and so we made that and made sure their feet sounded nice and that the garden sounded pretty, and then on top of that, Jon and I went to the library of sounds that I’d spent a year recording and we carefully placed in the sound of people over the wall. It was the sound of a hundred clogged feet, and then as you move further up the garden, there’s a quiet moment and you become aware of the electric fence. And then you hear some kind of metal barrels being moved.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

And Hedwig says a line: Rudolf calls me the “Queen of Auschwitz.” And then you hear some German shouting that I think came from a recording of, you know, late at night in Berlin. And then what we hear over the fence—further away, somewhat in the distance—is something going wrong within the camp and a random act of killing.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

And that gets the dogs nearer to them in the camp excited, which gets the domestic dog in the garden next to us excited. And obviously those things didn’t really happen on the day on the film set, but those were the kind of stories that we were painting into the background, and we certainly read that these were things that constantly happened.

Rosin: Yeah. That’s the moment where there are parallels, of which there are a lot.

It seems so effective because what’s happening is the dog is just her dog—her domestic pet, her personal dog—has just stolen something off the table or is excited about something. And, of course, her dog would smell the dogs on the other side of the fence and so they would kind of bounce off each other in a totally different way. But just the juxtaposition between the pet inside who’s just done a sort of routine bad thing, and then to imagine what’s going on outside and what the dogs are responding to is amazing.

That scene, which builds and builds as she’s taking her mother on a walk through the garden and showing her the beautiful handiwork in the garden, ends in a very dramatic way. We’re getting here close-ups of particular flowers, and you start to hear the bees and things come a lot closer. After the end of that, the screen goes fiery red-orange. So what’s happening there?

Burn: I mean, it’s hard to describe, really, because a film is made to be a complex thing that stands as more than the sum of its parts. But realistically, there’s an event, a chaotic event in the camp, that is dealt with seemingly by murder and perhaps by torture, and we’re a witness to that. And the film attempts to deal with the pain of watching that in a particular way.

[Sounds from The Zone of Interest]

It has a silent moment in it. It felt like the film needed some breathing space, and that whole thing with the scene sort of dissolving into a red screen, in my mind, answers our need as a human watching it to have a bit of a break from what you’re watching and just come up for air for a second and then carry on.

Rosin: Did you draw inspiration from horror movies more or documentaries more? What were you thinking? I mean, just this idea of something menacing just outside of view or grasp is a horror-movie feeling.

Burn: I’d say probably, certainly not. I only ever saw it as a documentary, realistic thing and certainly not of dramatization in anything. But it was absolutely to try and, I mean, I think the reality of it was horrific enough that if we got that right, then I think the immersion through the credibility of it being seemingly accurate is what makes it horrific, because as soon as you tried to lean on anything too much for the drama of it, then it would become awfully self-aware and not believable. And the truth of what happened there did not need exaggerating in any way.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay, when people talk about this movie, one thing they talk about is centering the victims versus centering the villains and how that’s done differently in the novel that this movie is based on. Because in the novel, in Martin Amis’s novel, you experience the victims more, and in this movie, they’re in the background. I’m not sure if “background” is the right word. Did you talk through that? Because it means that the sound and the thing you’re doing actually carries a huge amount of moral weight, like, a response to that: No, the victims are present. You just can’t see them.

Burn: Yeah, obviously the book was only a starting point, inspiration for the thing, but yeah, very much. Obviously the film is attempting to show how we ended up here, and to do that in a way that can connect with audiences—particularly, hopefully, younger audiences—and say, This is humans doing this to other humans and it’s a slippery slope, and it starts with ignoring the evil in your own neighborhood or whatever, and it can end up in a pretty awful place.

Rosin: A lot of people, and I would say this too, have said that this is a rare movie that really sticks with you in particular ways, like, horrifying ways, ethical ways, philosophical ways. This movie has a real long tail and leaves an impression. I wonder if that’s true for you, as the person who had to create all these sounds. Are there aspects of the work you did on this movie that have hung like a cloud over you since you made it?

Burn: Yeah, I think definitely for myself and I know for some of the other filmmakers too, I think it’s been a profound experience for sure. I think it’s impossible to not immerse yourself in this kind of material for such a long period of time, you know, years, and not come out of it somehow changed. But certainly, I’m really very glad that the film is out there. I’m super glad not to be working on it anymore.

Rosin: Right, right. I can imagine.

[Music]

Well, congratulations on making a really powerful movie, and thank you so much for talking with us about it in detail.

Burn: Thank you, Hanna. Very lovely to talk to you. Thank you for your interest.

Rosin: Thank you.

[Music]

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Yvonne Rolzhausen, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.