The Sound of Cruelty

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This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, which is up for a best picture this weekend, is a movie 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.

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.

The zone of interest is set in 1943.

The house and the garden are surrounded by a high wall, and outside that wall, right outside that wall, is the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The father of this family, Rudolf Haas, who is a real person, oversees the camp.

His wife Hedwick 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.

I've known John 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 John was pretty clear that 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.

This is Johnny Byrne.

He helped sound design the zone of interest and he's nominated for an Oscar.

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 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.

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.

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?

Is that why avoid 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.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, I can't speak for John, but I think that the point is, to me, it's, you know,

what is the point in redoing something that has already been done?

And we all have those images in our head, you know, and I think John said, you know, he didn't want to film a scene with loads of prisoners and, you know, all pretending that they were having a bad time and then sort of see them in the catering truck, you know, like half an hour later.

And I think everything about John's approach to filmmaking to me seems to be to try and get things as realistic as possible.

So how did you do it?

How do you actually figure that out or make it sound realistic?

Yeah, exactly.

That was what I thought.

How do I do this?

So, well, it involved an awful lot of reading.

And, you know, 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.

the way 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.

You know, 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.

You know, so all these things I was making note of and building a map of how the place looked and where the different sounds came from.

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.

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, and you know, late-night city centers, things like that.

And you know,

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 sort of trick you into believing you were hearing something horrific.

Wow, that's really, I did not, I would not have expected that because

so so that's sorry, my brain is just catching up to what you're saying because in because no, really, because what you're saying is that having actors do it, which is what normally happens in a movie, is somehow morally compromised and kind of more faked than collecting sounds from real people from totally different contexts and somehow packaging them together to recreate a certain kind of sound.

That's not an obvious thing.

Well,

you know, 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, yeah, for a lot of actors, I mean, I'm not, 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 and sort of recreate an atrocity.

And yeah, and morally, it felt like a no-go area anyways.

Just give me one more example, because I'd 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.

Like, where did you get the shouting from?

Yeah, there was a lot of the arrivals on the trains 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 sort of, you know, somewhat concealed and just hung out in the streets there.

And so,

for example, some of the French shouting you hear is, you know, the sound of people in pain or being arrested, or,

you know, all kind of recorded at quite a distance.

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 crematorium, 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.

The boy kind of goes,

He's basically mimicking the sound of

a kind of chimney making 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...

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 kind of attenuate the flames and a tube and a microphone to get the kind of sound of, you know, kind of wind going up a chimney.

There's another scene similar to that where the boy, the older brother, locks his younger brother in the garden shed.

Yeah.

And he makes another noise.

Do you remember that one?

Hissing.

Yeah, he makes a hissing noise, I guess.

Yeah.

And that was meant to be the sound.

Yeah, I mean, that's him mimicking the gas chambers and that's a 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.

More with sound designer Johnny Byrne after the break.

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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, you know, she's just arrived.

So she's just trying to orient herself.

Like, she's asking the obvious questions that in the family, nobody says out loud.

Like, Like, where are the Jews?

Is that the camp wall?

You know, and meanwhile, Hedwick keeps drawing her attention to all the splendor of her garden and the fine details.

So she's saying, like, ignore that, those sounds, you know, 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.

So yeah, the way we made that was,

you know, obviously none of that sound was actually there that's in the background.

And 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, John and I went to the library of sounds that I'd spent a year recording and

we carefully placed in the sound of people people over the wall and it was the sound of a hundred clog feet and then as you move further up the garden you know there's a quiet moment and you become aware of the electric fence

and then you hear some um kind of metal barrels being moved

and Hedwig says a line Rudolph calls me the Queen of Auschwitz

and then you hear some German shouting that I think came from a recording of

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.

And the video comes.

And that gets the dogs nearer to them in the camp excited, which gets the domestic dog in the garden next to us excited.

I mean, 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 happen.

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 the dog has 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 they melt.

I mean, things come a lot closer.

After the end of that, the screen goes fiery, red-orange.

So

what's happening there?

I mean, it's hard to describe really because,

you know, a film is made to be a complex thing

that stands as more than the sum of its parts.

But really, I mean, realistically, there's an event, a chaotic event in the camp that is dealt with by, you know, seemingly by murder and perhaps by torture.

And we're a witness to that and the film you know attempts to deal with the pain of watching that you know in a particular way

it has a silent moment in it

it felt like the film needed some breathing space and and that whole thing with you know with the scene sort of dissolving into a red screen

in my mind um answers you know our need as a human in 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.

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.

I'd say probably certainly not.

I mean I I only ever saw it as a documentary realistic thing and certainly not of dramatization and 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 yeah 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 amos's novel you do you know you experience the victims more um 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.

Yeah, I mean,

obviously, you know, 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.

to do that in a way that can connect with audiences, particularly hopefully, you know, younger audiences, and say,

you know, 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.

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 tale and and leaves an impression.

I wonder if that's true for you as the person who had to create all these sounds.

Like, are there aspects of the work you did on this movie that have

hung like a cloud over you since you made it?

Yeah, I think definitely, you know, 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 but certainly you know i'm i'm you know really very glad that the film was out there

i'm super glad not to be working on it anymore right right right right right i can imagine

well congratulations on making a really powerful movie and thank you so much for talking with us about it in detail thank you hannah very lovely to talk to you thank you for your interest.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West.

It was edited by Claudina Bade, fact-checked by Yvonne Rollshausen, and engineered by Rob Smersiak.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

Thank you for listening.