Johnnie Burn

Sound for film

Johnnie Burn is an Academy Award-winning film sound designer. He has been lucky to work on films including The Zone of Interest, Poor Things, Hamnet, Nope, Under the Skin, The Lobster, and more recently, Ink, Tuner, and Digger.

Johnnie Burn

Collaborations

Biography

Johnnie Burn is an Oscar-winning film sound designer, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer. He works with directors, ideally from script to final mix, developing sound as part of how a film tells its story. Johnnie has a dedicated workspace in London, Los Angeles and New York.

His influences include Hitchcock, Bergman and Walter Murch, particularly their use of sound to carry something the image cannot: a character’s perception, an unseen world, or a feeling that arrives before its explanation.

His film work includes longstanding collaborations with Jonathan Glazer and Yorgos Lanthimos. Recent projects include Daniel Roher’s Tuner, Danny Boyle’s INK and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger. For The Zone of Interest, he and production sound mixer Tarn Willers received the Academy Award and BAFTA for Best Sound. Other recognition includes the Cannes Vulcan Award, the Georges Delerue Music and Sound Award and European Sound Designer of the Year.

His work combines field recording, sound editorial and mixing. Most of his core team have worked with him for over a decade. The approach changes with each film, but the starting question remains simple: what can sound tell us?

Johnnie began with an apprenticeship in sound and spent his first decade in advertising, co-founding Wave Studios in 1999. His first film project was WIZ’s cult short Weekender. He also gives talks and masterclasses and is an ambassador for the Film and TV Charity.

Listen to a recent interview with Mastermind magazine’s Masterpieces podcast.

Artefacts

Drawings, notes and photographs from making sound for films. A few things kept along the way.

Nope

The Nope sound map

An early map I gave to Jordan Peele, before production. From the pre-production foothills to Mount Editorial and the final mix: a drawing of how we might make the sound together.

Under the Skin

Under the Skin sound map

Some early sound ideas I shared with Jonathan and Paul as the picture edit began. Notes and drawings about real sounds, synthetic sounds, and how she might hear the world.

Under the Skin · 2013

My first printmaster

My first film printmaster. I was incredulous that nearly two years of work could be distilled into something an inch by an inch.

Under the Skin

An alien space

Recording Foley in an anechoic chamber for Under the Skin. A very unusual place to listen.

The Favourite

Chimney wind

Simon recording chimney wind for The Favourite. Chimney wind became a huge part of the sound of the film.

Waves

Making water into music

Recording water for Waves, where the sound of water on hands becomes music. Open the photographs to see the recording and the scene in the mixing room.

Ammonite

Recording the sea

Out recording coastal sounds for Ammonite with my son.

Batbike

A rare treat

Couldn’t quite believe I got to sit on this.

Inspirations

These are some of the films that have inspired Johnnie over the years, and taught him a great deal about what sound can do. A few notes on what he loves hearing in each.

There are many more films worth listening to at Printmaster.

M — 1931

Director: Fritz Lang

One of the films that first showed how much more sound could do than simply accompany pictures. Lang uses silence sparingly, and a simple whistled melody tells us who the murderer is before we see him.

Seven Samurai — 1954

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Sound helps make the action easy to follow. Hooves, rain, mud, voices and Fumio Hayasaka’s music give each group its own rhythm, before everything collides in the final battle.

A Man Escaped — 1956

Director: Robert Bresson

So much of this world lives outside the frame. We rarely see the whole prison, so Fontaine — and we — build a picture of it by listening to keys, footsteps, doors, bells, trains and unseen guards.

Vertigo — 1958

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Sound and music draw us into Scottie’s obsession. Long stretches with little dialogue leave room for Bernard Herrmann’s circling phrases, which seem to carry desire, memory and dread before Scottie can put them into words.

Further reading: Sight and Sound on Vertigo

Persona — 1966

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Silence feels like something active here. Alma talks; Elisabet doesn’t, and her refusal changes the weight of every word, breath and pause around her.

Playtime — 1967

Director: Jacques Tati

There is rarely one sound telling us what matters. Footsteps, chairs, doors, glass, intercoms, machinery and fragments of speech keep gently pulling our attention around the frame.

2001: A Space Odyssey — 1968

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Much of the film’s power comes from not hearing what we expect. Space is largely silent; breathing, voices and machinery belong to the enclosed human spaces, while the classical music brings a sense of scale.

The Conversation — 1974

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

A film about the work of sound itself. A fragment of a surveillance recording is filtered, edited and replayed until the same sentence seems to mean something different.

Eraserhead — 1977

Director: David Lynch

David Lynch and Alan Splet let ambience become part of the drama. Hum, wind, vibration and breath press in around the characters, until apartment, factory, body and nightmare start to sound like parts of the same machine.

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope — 1977

Director: George Lucas

Ben Burtt made an imaginary universe sound as though it had existed for years. Lightsabers, blasters, ships, droids and creatures were largely built from sounds gathered in the real world.

Apocalypse Now — 1979

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Helicopter blades turn into a ceiling fan, music becomes part of the war, and the jungle keeps shifting between a real place and Willard’s troubled inner world.

Stalker — 1979

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

The landscape seems to have a voice of its own. Tarkovsky and Eduard Artemyev blur environmental sound and electronic music until water, metal, resonance and score become hard to tell apart.

Blow Out — 1981

Director: Brian De Palma

A thriller built around recording and editing sound. A sound recordist begins to suspect that a tyre blowout may have been a gunshot, and pieces sound and picture together to find out what happened.

Blade Runner — 1982

Director: Ridley Scott

The city is heard as much as it is seen. Rain, distant machinery, vehicles, advertising, voices in many languages and Vangelis’s electronics layer up into a place that seems to carry on far beyond the frame.

Come and See — 1985

Director: Elem Klimov

Instead of watching from a safe distance, we are often placed inside damaged perception. After explosions, the world falls away into ringing, pressure and distorted hearing.

Do the Right Thing — 1989

Director: Spike Lee

A Brooklyn block where everyone is competing to be heard. Voices overlap, radios clash, and Public Enemy’s Fight the Power keeps crossing between song, character and statement.

Jurassic Park — 1993

Director: Steven Spielberg

Gary Rydstrom’s creatures don’t just have sound effects — they have voices. Recordings of real animals were combined and reshaped to give them size, intention and personality.

Saving Private Ryan — 1998

Director: Steven Spielberg

The Normandy landing is full of physical detail — weapons, water, sand, metal and movement — but what stays with Johnnie is how it keeps collapsing into Captain Miller’s damaged hearing.

The Thin Red Line — 1998

Director: Terrence Malick

Malick doesn’t let war become the only sound in the world. Whispered inner voices drift between characters, while birds, insects, water and wind carry on around the violence, seemingly indifferent to it.

Mulholland Dr. — 2001

Director: David Lynch

Sound makes ordinary rooms feel unsettled before the picture explains why. And Club Silencio is a beautiful idea about playback: we are told there is no band, yet the recorded performance is still overwhelming.

No Country for Old Men — 2007

Directors: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

With almost no score, small practical sounds carry a lot of weight. Footsteps, engines, room tone and the pulse of a tracking device tell us who is coming, how close they are, and whether a wall will help.

WALL-E — 2008

Director: Andrew Stanton

Ben Burtt shows how a machine can become a character through sound. Motors, servos, tones and tiny fragments of language shift with WALL-E’s curiosity, fear and excitement.

Les Misérables — 2012

Director: Tom Hooper

The singing was recorded live on set rather than fixed in a studio beforehand. That let the music follow the acting: pauses could stretch, breath could be heard, and voices could crack in the moment.

Gravity — 2013

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

The lack of air in space shapes the whole soundtrack. Impacts are felt through contact and vibration, through suits and structures, while radio voices and music carry what ordinary effects can’t.

Son of Saul — 2015

Director: László Nemes

The camera stays close to Saul and keeps most of Auschwitz blurred or out of frame, so sound has to build what we aren’t shown. Commands, languages, machinery, doors and crowds create a vast, horrifying world around one narrow point of view.

Baby Driver — 2017

Director: Edgar Wright

The music isn’t added after the action — it is the clock the action runs to. Driving, footsteps, gunfire and editing keep locking into the rhythm of Baby’s tracks.

Zama — 2017

Director: Lucrecia Martel

People aren’t automatically at the centre of the soundtrack. Animals, insects, water and strange resonances compete with speech, and natural recordings with an almost electronic quality make the eighteenth-century world feel oddly present.

Roma — 2018

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Rather than music telling us how to feel, Roma surrounds us with life. Traffic, aircraft, street vendors, voices, animals and water come and go around Cuarón’s long takes, often well beyond the frame.

Sound of Metal — 2019

Director: Darius Marder

Many films use filtered sound briefly to suggest deafness. Sound of Metal makes changing ways of hearing part of the whole film.

Memoria — 2021

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

An unexplained noise becomes the subject of a whole film. Jessica tries to describe it, recreate it with a sound engineer and find where it comes from, yet the closer she gets, the deeper the mystery seems to become.