At the 96th Academy Awards ceremony, The Zone of Interest won Best Sound, which was accepted by production sound mixer Tarn Willers and sound engineer and designer, Johnnie Burn. Here, Willers explains how the audio team captured Oscar-winning sound for a director that asked its actors to embrace acting as if they were not in a film.
The Zone of Interest is a historical drama film written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, co-produced between the UK and Poland. Starring Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller as the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, it focuses on the pair as they strive to build a dream life for their family in a home in the ‘zone of interest’ – which just so happens to be next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Glazer opted against visually portraying the atrocities within the concentration camp, preferring that they be conveyed through sound alone. He has referred to the film's sound as "the other film" and, arguably, the core of the film.
In pursuit of this vision, Burn meticulously assembled a 600-page dossier comprising pertinent events at Auschwitz, witness testimonies and a comprehensive map of the camp to accurately gauge distances and echoes of sounds. Burn dedicated a year to crafting a sound library, encompassing noises from manufacturing machinery, crematoria, furnaces, boots and period-authentic gunfire.
The sounds emanating from behind the camp walls include the piercing screams of prisoners, the aggressive shouts of guards, and the ominous reverberation of the gas chambers and crematorium – all set as an ominous backdrop to mundane, everyday events taking place within a manicured residence within sight of the camp’s chimneys.