Johnnie Burn, the gifted sound designer of The Zone of Interest
The sound engineer recently won the CST Artist-Technician award and could well win an Oscar and a BAFTA for his impressive work on Jonathan Glazer’s film. Portrait.
If we asked you to name a famous sound engineer off the top of your head, you would probably be hard-pressed to give us a name. Things are perhaps changing with the recognition of Johnnie Burn, sound designer and sound editor of The Area of Interest, a film by Jonathan Glazer which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and is released today in theaters. Burn worked to recreate the horror of Auschwitz through his sounds, while the camera captures the frightening banality of the daily life of the camp commander and his family, who live in an adjacent house.
“ It was scary. My first reaction was to say to myself: “I won’t be able to do it”. It’s a big responsibility to be able to do this and do it well. », tells Slate the one who was awarded the CST (Higher Technical Commission for Image and Sound) prize for the Artist-Technician a few months ago, a reward honoring an artist-technician for his participation in a film in official competition on the Croisette.
Johnnie Burn worked tirelessly for a year to create 24 hours of soundtrack, recording his research in a 600-page document, traveling across Europe to capture screams in a football stadium, the sound of a motorcycle… era where shots were fired at a very precise distance. A soundscape of surgical precision, then applied to the images shot by Glazer. “ We obtained things that we would never have found by sitting in front of a sound bank and typing in precisely what we were looking for (…) We had to hear people who are suffering, and for it to seem credible. » For the interior of the house and the scenes in the garden, he sets up a network of 20 microphones of different models « to capture the sound of people in a surveillance manner. We hear the cups, the footsteps of adults and children. We put this whole part of the film together, edited it and mixed it. That’s when I said to Jonathan: “And now we can tackle the 10,000 sounds I’ve recorded over the past year.” », he explains to Release.
Burn is not his first attempt, far from it: after ten years in advertising, music videos (Travis Scott, Madonna, Prince, George Michael, David Bowie, the Spice Girls, etc.) and some more specific projects (the sounds of the Skype software, that’s him), he took his first steps in cinema in 2013 with Under The Skin, already directed by Jonathan Glazer. A remarkable and noted work on the strange, which logically attracted the attention of another master of the bizarre, Yórgos Lánthimos. They will collaborate on The Lobster, Killing of the sacred deer, The Favorite And Poor Creatures. Will follow Waves by Trey Edward Shults and Ammonite by Francis Lee, as well as Nope by Jordan Peele.
Nominated for Baftas and Oscars this year for The Area of InterestJohnnie Burn could well become the rockstar of sound designers.
