How The Zone of Interest was made as two films

I spoke with sound designer Johnnie Burn for my latest video on "The Zone of Interest."

When we talk about the meaning of a film, or the story it tells, we often focus on what is happening on screen. But how a movie is made, or how a story is shown, can often communicate just as much as what is shown. And in some movies, the relationship between the how and what, is where the entire thematic content of the film lies.

This is the idea I’m exploring in my latest video on The Zone of Interest, a movie that uses film form and structure to communicate most of what it’s trying to get across.

The Zone of Interest is about a horrifying disconnect. It's about a real couple. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss and his wife who lived with their family next to the concentration camp, separated by only a wall while daily mass murder and inconceivable levels of suffering were taking place right next door. I wrote about my initial reaction to this deeply unsettling film in an earlier issue of this newsletter.

How can any human perpetrate such unimaginable horror and how can they choose to live alongside it? This is the question that The Zone of Interest asks, not just in what it shows us but in how it shows us that story. In order to examine this question, the film subjects us to a simulation of the family’s day to day life. It then invites us to contemplate the question of how they could live like this for ourselves.

As you watch The Zone of Interest, if you pay attention to how it’s shot, edited, and crafted you’ll notice it takes an approach that looks and feels very unlike most movies we watch. The camera is almost entirely stationary. It almost exclusively uses wide, neutral, angles that don't seem to emphasize anything in particular. The entire film is lit with natural light; there are no soft cinematic shadows, the rooms are fairly dark, and the windows are blown out. This documentarian approach even affects the editing. Scenes play out in real time as one continuous take stitched together from multiple cameras that were set up all over the house and garden. Finally, and perhaps most significantly the film doesn't sound like most movies.

The sound of The Zone of Interest was crafted by director Jonathan Glazer and sound designer Johnnie Burn (who’s work on Nope and Under The Skin I’ve covered in the past). It’s work that was deservedly awarded Best Sound at the Oscars this year.

Johnnie agreed to chat for a bit about the unique process of designing one of the most haunting and disturbing soundscapes I’ve ever experienced. "Often a film will have nice glossy big sound,” he told me. “Footsteps crunch and clump and things have a zing to them, and this film definitely had the opposite of that. Jon and I really spent months carefully attenuating, where would we hear the clock ticking and what would the level of the chiming be. If that person's left the room we should still hear their feet when they're on the floor above? And if the boy's banging the drum he wouldn't stop just the camera's not on it. All those things.”

Behind all of this exacting detail was a desire for sound, that was above all else, realistic. In fact, all the stylistic choices in the film lean into a sort of documentarian realism in order to avoid the dramatic conventions of filmmaking, the way filmmakers style images, sound, performances, and editing in order to make things more tense, dark, dramatic, or whatever best fits the purposes of the story.

“Very much it was to avoid in any way it being a dramatization,” Johnnie told me. “I think authenticity is absolutely key and the more this feels like a document, the more credible it is and I think there was an enormous desire to avoid any form of sensationalism as well.”

But the stylistic approach wasn’t the only unusual thing about how the film was made. The production was divided into two parts, in order to cement the film’s thematic content into the structure of the film itself.

Once all the scenes of the family drama were shot, Jonathan Glazer and picture editor Paul Watts then spent a year in post carefully shaping the narrative of the day-to-day family drama we see on screen, along with the sound of everything that makes the house feel busy and lived in. This left them with a completed version of the film that the team called "Film One."

Then Glazer and Johnnie Burn started over from the beginning, creating the most important part of the story. A second full layer of sound design, one that represents everything that lies over the garden wall. This side of the story, which we never see but only hear, is what the team called "Film Two." Creating the film in two separate parts like this baked the Höss’ dehumanizing compartmentalization into the structure of the film itself. It was impossible for the actors performing, the cinematography, or editing to react to “Film Two” because it didn't exist when “Film One” was being made.

Johnnie and I talk more about the process of creating the film’s sound, and I look more closely at how the film’s structure and thematic content intertwine, in the full video.