173 - Director Jonathan Glazer and the Sound of The Zone of Interest

Academy Award®-nominated director Jonathan Glazer joins us to discuss his latest film, 2024 Best Picture nominee “The Zone of Interest,” a searing drama about life just outside of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, which the director chose to have the audience hear, rather than see.

“The atrocities that are being committed in the camps — and the images that we already know in our minds, from all of the documentaries and books and fiction films and so on… I had absolutely no interest in reenacting any of them… But at the same time, they were out of sight, they needed to never be out of mind. So what I was serving in my script was how those sounds could come across the wall and permeate every frame of the film, bare down on this mundanity that we're witnessing day to day. And it sort of felt like that was the second film we were making. We always talked about there are two films: the one you see and the one you hear. And I think in many ways, the one you hear was the most important one to me.”

—Jonathan Glazer, Director, “The Zone of Interest”

Joining the discussion is producer James Wilson, as well as Johnnie Burn, the film’s sound designer, supervising sound editor, and re-recording mixer, whose work on this film also received a 2024 Academy Award nomination in the Sound category.

This conversation was recorded as a live panel discussion after a screening of the film at the New York Film Festival and was part of our support of the FLC Artist Academy program, where we bring conversations about the art and craft of filmmaking to the next generation of directors:

https://www.filmlinc.org/academy-programs/artists-academy/

Be sure to check out “The Zone of Interest,” now in theaters.

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