How ‘Zone of Interest’ Achieved Its Chilling Sound

variety.com:

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor When filmmaker Jonathan Glazer sent sound designer Johnnie Burn the script for his Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” a year before production even began, Glazer laid down clear guidelines for the role sound was going to play: He did not want to share images that audiences knew and he wasn’t going to show the familiar, devastating scenes of the Polish concentration camp.

He wanted to reflect everything through sound. Glazer told Burn, who was also sound designer on “Poor Things,” that he wanted him to become an expert on the sounds that would have emanated from the camp in 1943.

The Oscar-nominated film centers around Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) who live a dream life with their children in a seemingly-perfect home — except that the house and garden border a concentration camp.

Burn says the film was approached two ways: “We saw it as being two films: one you see, and one you hear. We made the family drama film without any sound, and Jon and I spent five months deciding where to apply the sound of the camp.” As Rudolf and Hedwig live their lives of apparent domestic bliss, smoke billows in the distance and the audience hears the grim sound of dogs barking, gunshots being fired in the distance and bone-chilling screams.