M — 1931
Director: Fritz Lang
One of the earliest demonstrations that sound could do far more than accompany pictures. Lang uses silence selectively and lets a simple whistled melody identify the murderer before we see him.
Johnnie Burn
Sound for film
Johnnie Burn
Johnnie Burn is a sound designer, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer. He works with directors to develop the sound of their films, from the first conversations to the final mix. He believes sound reaches the audience before thought does.
Biography
Johnnie Burn is a British sound designer, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer.
At around nineteen, while studying business, Johnnie briefly lost his hearing after a water bottle exploded. The experience prompted him to leave university and pursue his interest in sound.
He started as a runner at a recording studio in Soho, learning the craft through an apprenticeship and working on the studio’s equipment after hours. Commercials and music videos brought him into contact with Jonathan Glazer.
Glazer’s Birth (2004) marked his move into major feature films. Their collaboration continued with Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest, alongside a long-standing working relationship with Yorgos Lanthimos and films with directors including Jordan Peele and Trey Edward Shults.
For The Zone of Interest, he shared the 2024 Academy Award and BAFTA for Sound with Tarn Willers, and received the 2023 CST Award for Best Artist-Technician at Cannes. In 2024, he became the first sound designer to sign with Creative Artists Agency.
The work
His work includes long-standing collaborations with Jonathan Glazer and Yorgos Lanthimos, and films with Jordan Peele, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Danny Boyle, Chloé Zhao, Ben Affleck, Trey Edward Shults and Daniel Roher.
He often begins with the script, working with the director to find what sound can bring to the story.
For Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a long period of research and experimentation went into building the world heard beyond the garden wall. Distant voices, machinery and violence tell the part of the story that remains outside the frame. The film received the Academy Award and BAFTA for Sound, shared by Johnnie and Tarn Willers, and Johnnie received the CST Award for Best Artist-Technician at Cannes.
On Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, he joined during post-production to make the final mix.
For Ben Affleck’s Animals, the sounds of Los Angeles contribute to the pressure surrounding the characters.
Danny Boyle’s INK draws on the everyday noise of the pre-digital era: printing presses, typewriters, telephones and trains. Their rhythms give the film much of its pace.
In Daniel Roher’s Tuner, sound brings the audience into the experience of a character with an unusually sensitive ear.
Other films include Under the Skin, Nope, The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, Bugonia, 28 Years Later and Hamnet. Johnnie is based in London and represented by CAA.
Landmarks in film sound
A few films that show what sound can do.
Seven Samurai — 1954
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Kurosawa makes action intelligible through sound. Hooves, rain, mud, voices, movement and Fumio Hayasaka's music give different groups their own rhythmic identities, then collide during the extraordinary final battle.
A Man Escaped — 1956
Director: Robert Bresson
Bresson demonstrates how much of a world can exist outside the frame. We rarely receive a complete visual map of the prison, so Fontaine — and the audience — must build one by listening to keys, footsteps, doors, bells, trains and unseen guards.
Persona — 1966
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Here silence is not the absence of communication but an active force. Alma talks; Elisabet refuses to, and that refusal changes the weight and meaning of every word, breath and pause around her.
Playtime — 1967
Director: Jacques Tati
Tati created a remarkably democratic soundtrack. There is rarely one obvious sound telling us what matters: footsteps, chairs, doors, glass, intercoms, machinery and fragments of speech constantly pull our attention around the huge frame.
2001: A Space Odyssey — 1968
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick understood the expressive power of not hearing what audiences expected to hear. Space itself is largely silent; breathing, voices and machinery belong to enclosed human environments, while classical music supplies scale and transcendence.
The Conversation — 1974
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Few films have made the actual process of sound work so central to their drama. A fragmented surveillance recording is repeatedly filtered, edited and replayed until the same sentence appears to reveal something different.
Eraserhead — 1977
Director: David Lynch
David Lynch and Alan Splet transformed ambience from background into dramatic material. Industrial hum, wind, mechanical vibration, breath and bodily noises form a nearly continuous pressure around the characters, so that apartment, factory, body and nightmare begin to sound like parts of the same machine.
Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope — 1977
Director: George Lucas
Ben Burtt's great achievement was to make an impossible universe sound as though it had already existed for years. Lightsabers, blasters, spacecraft, droids and creatures were given distinctive identities largely through imaginative manipulation of sounds gathered from the real world.
Apocalypse Now — 1979
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
A landmark in both spatial sound and subjective sound. Helicopter blades turn into a ceiling fan, music becomes part of warfare, and the jungle moves continually between physical environment and Willard's damaged interior world.
Stalker — 1979
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
In Stalker, landscape seems to possess an acoustic consciousness of its own. Tarkovsky and Eduard Artemyev blur environmental sound and electronic music until water, metal, machinery, resonance and score can become almost impossible to distinguish.
Blow Out — 1981
Director: Brian De Palma
Blow Out makes sound recording and editing the machinery of a thriller. A sound recordist realises that what seemed to be a tyre blowout may contain a gunshot, then synchronises and reconstructs fragments of sound and image to discover what happened.
Blade Runner — 1982
Director: Ridley Scott
The future of Blade Runner is heard as much as it is seen. Rain, distant machinery, vehicles, advertising, multilingual voices and Vangelis's electronics occupy layer upon layer of space, suggesting an enormous city continuing vertically and horizontally beyond the frame.
Come and See — 1985
Director: Elem Klimov
Rather than offering the safe perspective of a spectator watching battle, Come and See repeatedly traps us inside damaged perception. After explosions, external detail collapses into ringing, pressure and distorted hearing.
Do the Right Thing — 1989
Director: Spike Lee
Spike Lee turns a Brooklyn block into contested acoustic territory. People interrupt one another, radios compete, voices travel through public space, and Public Enemy's Fight the Power repeatedly crosses the boundary between song, character and political declaration.
Jurassic Park — 1993
Director: Steven Spielberg
Gary Rydstrom's creatures do not merely have sound effects — they have voices. Recordings of living animals were combined and reshaped to give imaginary animals anatomy, scale, intention, emotion and personality.
Saving Private Ryan — 1998
Director: Steven Spielberg
The Normandy landing reset expectations for cinematic battle sound. Weapons, water, sand, metal, impacts and human movement are rendered with extraordinary physical specificity, but the greater innovation is the repeated collapse from that overwhelming exterior world into Captain Miller's damaged hearing.
The Thin Red Line — 1998
Director: Terrence Malick
Malick refuses to let war become the only important sound in the world. Whispered interior voices move between characters while birds, insects, water and wind continue around human violence, often apparently indifferent to it.
Mulholland Dr. — 2001
Director: David Lynch
Lynch uses sound to make apparently ordinary spaces unstable before the image explains why. Low tones and drones alter the emotional geometry of rooms, while Club Silencio delivers one of cinema's great explorations of playback: we are explicitly told that there is no band, yet a recorded performance remains emotionally overwhelming.
No Country for Old Men — 2007
Directors: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
With almost no conventional score, the smallest practical sounds acquire enormous dramatic weight. Footsteps, engines, weapons, room tone and the electronic pulse of a tracking device tell us who is approaching, how far away they are and whether a wall offers any protection.
WALL-E — 2008
Director: Andrew Stanton
Ben Burtt proves that a machine can become a fully expressive character through sound. Motors, servos, treads, electronic tones, tiny fragments of language and vocal inflection change according to WALL-E's curiosity, fear, excitement and physical effort.
Les Misérables — 2012
Director: Tom Hooper
Instead of asking actors to reproduce performances previously fixed in a recording studio, Les Misérables recorded its principal singing live on set. That reversal allowed tempo to follow acting: pauses could lengthen, breath could become audible, voices could crack and musical timing could respond to emotion in the moment.
Gravity — 2013
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
The absence of air in space becomes the organising principle of the soundtrack rather than an inconvenience to be ignored. Impacts are experienced through contact, vibration, suits and structures; transmitted voices and music carry information that conventional exterior effects cannot.
Son of Saul — 2015
Director: László Nemes
The image deliberately refuses to show us most of Auschwitz, remaining close to Saul and often leaving the surrounding world blurred or outside the frame. Sound has to construct what vision withholds: commands, languages, machinery, doors, crowds and violence create a vast, horrifying geography around one restricted point of view.
Baby Driver — 2017
Director: Edgar Wright
Here music is not something added after the action: it is the clock by which the action operates. Driving, footsteps, gunfire, physical gestures, editing and environmental details repeatedly lock into the rhythm of Baby's chosen tracks.
Zama — 2017
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Martel refuses to let human beings occupy the automatic centre of the soundtrack. Animals, insects, water and strange resonances repeatedly compete with speech, while natural recordings with almost electronic qualities make the eighteenth-century world feel oddly contemporary and unstable.
Roma — 2018
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Rather than using music to continually tell us where to direct our emotions, Roma builds an extraordinary field of surrounding life. Traffic, aircraft, street vendors, voices, animals, water and distant activity approach and recede around Cuarón's long takes, often continuing far beyond the frame.
Sound of Metal — 2019
Director: Darius Marder
Many films use filtered sound briefly to represent deafness. Sound of Metal makes changing modes of hearing central to the entire film.
Memoria — 2021
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
An unexplained noise becomes the subject of an entire film. Jessica tries to describe it, reproduce it with a sound engineer and locate its origin, yet every increase in technical precision seems to deepen rather than solve the mystery.