Johnnie Burn — Sound for film

A way into sound

Johnnie Burn is a British sound designer, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer. Born in Malta in 1970 and raised in England, he came to film without film school or a conventional route into the industry.

As a teenager he was absorbed by music and by the samplers and synthesisers then beginning to appear in Soho’s music shops. He nevertheless enrolled on a business degree at City University in London. At about nineteen, a freak accident in which a water bottle exploded left him profoundly deaf for around twenty minutes. Feeling the speakers in his room but hearing nothing made the importance of sound suddenly physical. He left university and found an apprenticeship at a recording studio in Soho.

The job began with the ordinary work of a runner. The real education often happened after six in the evening, when the studio closed and he could stay behind to teach himself its Synclavier. He spent roughly a decade learning recording, editing and mixing from the equipment outward, first through music videos and advertising.

Glazer, commercials and learning film

That work led to Jonathan Glazer. Their early collaborations included the Guinness Surfer commercial and UNKLE’s Rabbit in Your Headlights video, projects in which sound was already being asked to do more than simply support music or pictures. In 1999, Burn co-founded Wave Studios in London with Warren Hamilton.

Glazer’s Birth (2004) was Burn’s first encounter with a major feature, and not an effortlessly triumphant one. An early mix, approached with the force and compression of a commercial, went badly enough that he was removed as head of sound before being brought back as a sound designer. Burn has told the story openly because it marks the point at which he had to learn that film sound works through duration, restraint, recurrence and counterpoint, not impact alone.

Under the Skin became the real breakthrough. Burn and the team gathered documentary recordings on the streets of Glasgow, including voices captured with a directional microphone concealed in an umbrella. Rather than cleaning away every anomaly, they kept the abrasive and incidental material that made the city feel observed rather than manufactured. Burn has described the years spent working closely with Glazer as his film school.

A method of listening

Burn usually begins with the script and tries to stay involved through recording, editorial and the final theatrical mix. His idea of sound design is deliberately broad: not the invention of an isolated effect, but responsibility for how a film is heard from beginning to end and how sound carries story, emotion and point of view.

Field recording is central to that process. A library can supply a technically correct noise; a location supplies the mistakes, overlaps and odd details that suggest an actual world. New recordings are shaped cinematically rather than treated as documentary purity. Natural pitches and rhythms may be extended, environmental sounds may take on the function of music, and dialogue, effects, silence and score are developed in conversation with one another.

This approach depends on collaboration. Burn’s work is made with production sound mixers, editors, assistants, Foley artists, composers and re-recording mixers, many of them recurring colleagues. Among the closest are Simon Carroll, Max Behrens, Brendan Feeney and Declan Ilett, alongside different teams assembled around the needs of each film.

Films and collaborations

The partnership with Glazer continued through The Zone of Interest. A long relationship with Yorgos Lanthimos has included The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness and Bugonia. Other collaborations include films with Jordan Peele, Trey Edward Shults, Francis Lee, Danny Boyle, Chloé Zhao, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Ben Affleck and Daniel Roher.

The films call for very different kinds of listening. Nope places an audience inside a huge exterior environment and lets tiny disturbances reveal a presence above it. Poor Things combines animal, mechanical and bodily sounds into a deliberately fabricated world. Across the work, the recurring question is less “what effect belongs here?” than “what can the audience understand or feel by hearing this?”

Recent work has taken that question in several directions. On Digger, Burn joined late in post-production as re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor (UK), bringing Richard King’s sound work, the music and the wider team’s contributions into the final mix. INK draws rhythm from the mechanical world of printing presses, typewriters, telephones and trains. The sounds of Los Angeles contribute to the pressure around the characters in Animals, while Tuner places the audience inside the experience of a man with unusually sensitive hearing.

The Zone of Interest

For The Zone of Interest, Glazer and Burn conceived the image and soundtrack as two films occupying the same time. The visible film remains largely with the domestic life of the Höss family. The unheard world beyond their garden wall is made present through sound.

Burn spent about a year researching testimony, machinery, weapons and the daily chronology of Auschwitz in 1943, followed by extensive recording in real locations. The intention was not to stage theatrical imitations of suffering, but to construct precise off-screen scenarios from sounds gathered in the world, then place them at credible distances from the house. The work was developed with production sound mixer Tarn Willers and a sound editorial team including Simon Carroll, Max Behrens and Brendan Feeney.

Burn and Willers received the Academy Award, BAFTA and European Film Award for Sound. At Cannes, Burn received the CST Artist-Technician Award. These honours sit at the end of the story rather than defining it: the achievement belongs to the film’s unusual conviction that an audience can be made to confront what is withheld from view.

Beyond the films

Burn continues to work between London and the United States and remains a founding partner of Wave Studios. He is also an ambassador for the Film and TV Charity, supporting its work on mental health, financial hardship and better working lives for people behind the camera.