At the recent Media Production & Technology Show in London, Resurface co-founder Ben Nemes had the opportunity to speak to 2024 BAFTA and Oscar-winning Sound Designer Johnnie Burn about his career, craft and approach to the sound of The Zone of Interest.
A recording, along with a full transcription, of that conversation is below.
Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Session 1, Day 1 of the Media Production & Technology Show 2024, here at the Audio Theatre. My name is Ben Nemes. I’ll be your host for this and a few of the other sessions across the next two days. We’ve got some incredible stuff here at the Audio Theatre.
Catch as many as you can. Some really great work, some really interesting people. Not least of which this session, we’re starting with a bang, more of which in a second. Couple of announcements to make. First of all, you should all be on the blue channel on your Bluetooth headphones. Those that have them… I think you all are.
If you’re not, you can’t hear me say that anyway. OK, Good. And secondly, questions: For each of the sessions here today and tomorrow we are going to have the ability to take questions for our guests. We do that with a platform called Slido, which is www.slido.com. If you go there, you’ll see a place to put in the hashtag MPTS2024, pick the audio theatre, pose your question, and then whoever the host is of any given session can look through the questions and put those questions to the guests.
So that’s questions. There’s also a radio mic being thrown around towards the end when we have our questions. If you want anything asked then, that radio mic, your Bluetooth headphones, the clips you’re going to hear, all thanks to Alex, who’s doing our sound today and tomorrow. And here at the Audio Theatre, we acknowledge and thank sound people because it’s just the right thing to do, isn’t it?
Ben Nemes: And so, without further ado, our first guest this morning.
He is the current holder of the BAFTA award for best sound. He’s the current holder of the AMPS award (AMPS are just down there on the left, if you want to go and see them). He’s the current holder of the American Academy Oscar for best sound.
The European Film Award for best sound, the London Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association. North Carolina, North Dakota, San Diego Film Critics Associations, the International Cinephile Award, Online Film and TV Association. The What Car best midsize SUV, and he’s nailed-on for the men’s 110 metre hurdles this summer at the Paris Olympics!
We’re immensely lucky that he could be joining us today, for two reasons really. One is that he’s a very busy guy. Second is that today is, in fact, his birthday!
And so, If we could give a big Media Production & Technology Show, Birthday Boy Welcome to Mr. Johnnie Burn.
Johnnie Burn: Thank you very much.
Origin Stories
BN: Johnnie, thank you for being with us this morning, and quite a year that you’re having. We’re going to get to a very particular piece of work called The Zone of Interest, which a lot of those awards I’ve just mentioned were attached to.
But before that, we will get there. Before that, I wanted to kind of chart your journey to that particular summit, because it’s not the not the age-old route from the foothills of feature film sound to the top of that hill. You’ve kind of already scaled a peak or two ahead of that. You’ve come sideways to the long form, feature film world.
So, if we could go back a little way, and I’ve known you since, I don’t know, ’99, 2000? When you opened Wave Studios here in London. But before that, of course, there’s always an origin story, always a moment or a chapter, where you realise that sound design, one, is a thing – and two, is the thing for you.
How far back does that go with you? Is it kind of taping stuff off the radio at home?
JB: Yeah. I mean, as a teen in the eighties, I had a bedroom full of everything I could get from the back page of New Musical Express and the classifieds: Old samplers and DJ equipment, all that sort of stuff.
And yeah, a bedroom full of wires. And then, I actually went and did a business degree, but I realised through kind of a weird event:
I had this thing where I wedged a plastic bottle of Evian under a tap in my kitchen. And I left the tap on full blast.
I came back an hour later, having forgotten about it, and when I touched it, it blew up. And it must have been under London ring-main pressure or whatever, but it covered me in water and plastic, and I was profoundly deaf.
And I went back upstairs to my bedroom and played Public Enemy at full blast out of the speakers – couldn’t hear a thing, felt them moving, and I was like, wow, I’ve killed the thing I love.
And that, that was sort of the “Oh, that’s what I like!” moment.
BN: So nearly over before it began!
JB: Yeah, pretty much. And so I did a term at university, a business degree, And then and then found a job as a runner, working in a recording studio in a commercials post house in London.
BN: Right, so that was, I guess we’re talking mid 90s, early 90s?
JB: 90s, yeah, 1990. Valentine’s Day 1990 was my first day of work in the industry.
BN: And then presumably you, as was customary then and still now really, you’d have started that work as a runner.
JB: That’s right, yeah.
BN: The story generally goes that one day, through a set of circumstances, you were thrust into the big chair.
JB: That did happen to me. I was the tea boy and I was bringing in cups of tea for the clients. And there was this actor there who was waiting to record an Abbey National voiceover for the Abbey National Building Society. And the engineer, the sound engineer, hadn’t turned up for work that day.
No one knew where he was (pre mobile phones), where is he? And the client from the advertising agency was saying, “How do we, you know, what, what can we do? Who, you know, how can we record this person?”
And I said “Well, I know how the buttons work if you want to give me a go!” And they were so grateful. That went very well, they then insisted to the boss of the company that I did all their future work.
BN: Right, so you became their asked-for engineer, therefore your name is on their account.
JB: Yeah, so I did a super-quick leap from runner to hairdresser-with-chair kind of thing, man with studio.
BN: And did you know what the buttons did? Or was that a blag?
JB: Oh, I did. Yeah I did. I was actually really lucky. I got viciously dumped by a girlfriend, so that made me stay at work, to occupy my time, for a whole year. Learning how the Synclavier works. So I was really lucky.
It was the dawn of digital music tech. My first few weeks of work were still editing on tape and playing sound off cart machines. But we then spent 300,000 each, on a few of these machines. And it was, you know, what Michael Jackson wrote the Thriller album on and it was an incredible piece of musical equipment that was also really good at sound audio post for commercials.
BN: So you put the time in off your own back…
JB: Well, every night, once the clients had left at 6pm, it was mine. So, yeah, I knew exactly how it all worked.
BN: So, when the time came, you were ready!
JB: Essentially. Yeah. I think it’s really important to get the technical side of things, motor muscle memory sorted, and then you can be creative.
BN: And this is all short form, this is all commercial spots.
JB: Yeah, commercial spots. And then I met Jonathan Glazer, who got me doing music videos as well.
BN: I think he’s our through-line into the second part of this conversation, isn’t he? John Glazer was a big client of yours. Because that pathway, it seems to me that for directors and maybe cinematographers, that pathway from short form to features is quite well trodden.
It’s kind of normal that, I don’t know, Ridley Scott does a pop promo, then a film? But in sound, it’s really quite rare. I mean, I don’t know many people that have made the journey you’ve made from 90 seconds to 90 minutes. You met John Glazer as you were setting up Wave, or before that?
JB: So I met John Glazer, started working with him about three years before I set up Wave. So I worked at a company for 10 years. And in the last three years of that, I started doing commercials with John.
The first thing we did together was the Unkle Rabbit In Your Headlights music video. And then we did some Stella Artois commercials and A few Guinness commercials. And then I left, set up my own company, and the first piece of work that John asked me to do there was the Guinness Surfer Ad.
BN [to audience]: People all know that, right? The Guinness Surfer ad?
JB: And that was our opening gambit as a company. That was job one, so things really flew from that point. We were fine.
BN: Because your relationship with him takes you through a couple of stages, I think. One of the things about short form, about commercials particularly, is there’s no credit roll, and there’s no IMDB. So you kind of don’t know – unless you need to know – who worked on what.
JB: Yeah It’s very ‘inside the industry’ knowledge.
BN: I mean, I guess in a lot of ways that’s all you care about, right? – clients know! But there’s no kind of glory in the same way as there is where you can go through the end credits and say you did that.
When you started it up with the Guinness Surfer, some of the Honda stuff (Honda Cog) and everyone remembers the Dairy Milk drumming gorilla, right? That’s you guys. That’s Wave.
JB: Yeah, that’s that’s me making the grunting noise!
BN: You were the gorilla?
JB: I was the gorilla.
BN: There you go And that’s kind of the top end, most known sound-design-wise commercials were all coming out of Wave for that period.
You then, by that point, met John Glazer, and he’s starting to get into feature films?
JB: Yeah, so he did Sexy Beast, and that was his first film, and I didn’t work on that – He didn’t ask me! – But when he did his second film, Birth, he said, please will you be the head of sound on this? And I had a jolly good go! I did the first temp mix of it.
BN: ..and presumably it was great!
JB: I actually got fired after. TV commercials used to be, sound wise, get the needle up to the top and park it there and compress the hell out of it, and then deal with the QC issues and make it tonally perfect to come out of a TV speaker. Which is very different to now.
BN: Make it louder than the thing before and the thing after.
JB: Exactly. And I was like, well, that must be how you mix a feature film! So, I did a temp mix to which Barbara Broccoli (of the Bond franchise) was invited down to view the nascent cut of the film, halfway through the sound edit. She stood up halfway through and said “Stop, I can’t listen to this. Who mixed this? It’s terrible”.
And I realised then that I didn’t know much about film sound. I then didn’t continue working on that project.
BN: Were you invited not to continue working on that project?
JB: I was invited not to continue! I went back to commercials, licked my wounds and thought, I just don’t want to, I don’t like films!
It was a raw experience. And about six years later, John Glazer, still having worked with him on many commercials in that period, came back to me again and said, “I’m doing another film. It’s called Under the Skin. Please find out what it is you didn’t understand because you are great, you’ve got this, and I really want you to, you’re gonna do it. You’re my dude!”.
And I was like, OK. So I found three really cheap films that just needed someone, to do for virtually nothing. And I spent a couple of years understanding exactly how to mix a film and how to do something that I, you know, all sorts of knowledge that I really should have had before starting on New Line Cinema’s, 50 million dollar movie.
BN: Second chance almost. Second chance saloon?
JB: I got another chance!
Under The Skin
BN: Well, Under the Skin we should talk about. In fact, I’ve got a clip to show in a second. So Under the Skin was the first successful collaboration with John Glazer! And it’s widely regarded as something of a cult classic, I think, as well.
It’s one of those films that if you know : you know, I suppose as well. For those who don’t know Under The Skin – I need to explain this because the clip will make more sense. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien (and jump in if I get this wrong). Scarlett Johansson plays an alien who comes to modern day Glasgow and entices men into a van and then harvests them.
JB: Yeah, that’s the premise.
BN: In the clip we’re about to see, Scarlett Johansson’s character, who’s called The Female, is on a beach, and she’s met a character called The Swimmer, who’s out there swimming, and there’s a family. A dog who’s in the sea, and a young girl who’s gone to try and rescue her dog from being dashed on the rocks, and then the father, fully clothed, who’s gone into the sea, presumably to try and rescue – ideally – the girl, maybe the dog, but anything will do at that point.
Swimmer sees this happening and goes in to rescue the dad, has dragged him out of the sea, and the dad’s gone straight back in, presumably to his death. All this being observed by Scarlett Johansson’s character, The Female.
And we’ll play the clip because there’s something that happens in it that I think foretells of The Zone of Interest.
I meant to say the following clip contains scenes of violence. I knew there was something, I forgot.
JB: Everyone’s still here!
BN: So, at the end: The bit about that, that I think made me think of Zone of Interest is the baby. When we realise that, oh crap, there’s a baby in the family as well, and the dad’s drowned, everyone’s dead, presumably the baby’s going to die, but the baby’s presence is only felt through sound.
Which kind of brings us on to the sound of The Zone of Interest, if I may.
Well actually, before that, talking about Under the Skin as a kind of cult classic, it has its fans as well within the industry: Directors.
JB: Yeah, I mean, I would say pretty much every director I’ve ever worked with since Under the Skin has said – in the first 60 seconds – I loved Under the Skin. And that’s been my calling card.
BN: Because in all that stuff I said about Zone of Interest and its success this year, one other thing that you had out this year – that we didn’t even mention so far is Poor Things. Another one of this year’s stand-out pieces of work. Director of that is Yorgos Lanthimos. Who’s an Under the Skin fan?
JB: He’s a big Under the Skin fan. So I first met him about six months after Under the Skin came out and he said “I’m doing a film called The Lobster. Will you work on that?” Actually, we all went out to the set in Ireland, I went along for the shoot as well.
And the night before filming began, he hired a coach and took all the cast and crew to the local cinema to watch Under the Skin and said, “That’s the bar. it needs to be as good as that”. So yeah, he was that much of a fan of it.
BN: That’s amazing. I just wanted not to go through this whole time and not mention Poor Things. Just wanted to make sure we got that in.
JB: It was a very funny movie.
The Sound of The Zone of Interest
BN: Let’s get into The Zone of Interest then.
So, we just talked about having something you can’t see, being the point. And that’s kind of what we get to with The Zone of Interest. [to audience] So quick show of hands, just so I know, before saying stuff everyone knows: Who has seen The Zone of Interest?
There you go, box office right there!
OK, so, for those who haven’t: It’s the story of a German family in World War II who live in a lovely house, over the fence adjacent to Auschwitz. The patriarch, the father of the family, is the Commandant. And – I think I’m right in saying – it’s originally based on an Amis novel?
And for many years John Glazer, the director, didn’t know how to make it?
I’ve heard him say in interviews that he was going back and forth with it. Because he didn’t want to do a ‘barbed wire and striped pyjamas’ Auschwitz film.
JB: He said he had no interest in showing people the images that they already have in their head. What’s the point of that, it’s sensationalised.
So he spent a long time trying to find a different way of putting it across.
BN: The way he came up with, and ultimately made the film, was something very, very different. This is kind of where you come into it, really.
Can we talk about this ‘two film’ methodology? There are two Zone of Interest movies? I’ll let you explain!
JB: So, the Zone of Interest is, on the one hand, a family drama where you’re inside this house and, in fact, John said to me, “I’m gonna go and film a family drama, and then when I come back, we’ll put the horrorscape on it, and that will be how we’ll force the point”.
So, it’s a family drama, lovely, you know “That’s a bit like my family, we have a dog!” and film two is all the sound that comes from over the wall.
And pretty much John said to me before, like a year before filming, this script – it doesn’t say a lot in it, but it will use sound to make the presence of the camp aware.
And there was one scene at that point that did go in the camp at night in a dream, but that then came out. And so he was basically saying – like you say – I have no interest in showing the images you already know. But we can use our collective knowledge of that time period to paint images with sound.
So he kind of said to me, “I need you to do some research and find out what Auschwitz sounded like in 1943 and be able to play that to me in about a year’s time when I come back from having filmed it, because we’re going to make Film One.
BN: Film One exists in its entirety? But it’s a it’s a fairly dull story of a family in 1943 in southern Germany and Poland.
JB: Guy does okay at work, gets a promotion…
BN: Actually we have a clip, I think, which kind of sums this up nicely. So this is a scene in which Rudolph, who’s the Auschwitz commandant, is having a smoke and locking up the house before going to bed.
Turning off all the lights, everyone’s left on. Kids are in their room messing about. It’s a story of quotidian normality set against the catastrophic horror of Auschwitz.
I think that clip really just encapsulates the approach, in that it’s just such an everyday scene of family, boring, normal-ness. And then – but there it is – the detail and the enormity of what’s going on over the fence. It’s just constantly there and yet they don’t really acknowledge it. The kids do, a bit.
It’s like the only member of the family that seems to react to what’s going on is the dog, who barks at the Alsatians.
JB: Yep. Careful editing!
BN: I saw it in the cinema and it stays with you for a long time. And watching it in the cinema, I kept having to, kind of – I kept feeling bad because I was doing that. I was tuning out the sound of the camp, because you’re used to dialogue and ‘what am I listening to’, and that kind of gives you a weird kind of empathy with the family. You kind of got how that might happen, I suppose? Did you find the same thing working on it?
JB: Yeah, I mean, it’s the ‘thin end of the wedge’ thing. It was weird, actually, because even when mixing it, we had this phenomenon.
Normally, you would work your way through a film. You’d start at the beginning of the film and by the end of the first week, you might be 40 minutes in and then, when you come in on Friday morning, you’d play at 40 minutes.
When we did that on Friday morning, for example, we found everything was too loud and we were just like “What the hell?”, and I really thought it was a mistake – and that someone had been playing with the buttons or something like that.
But what we realised was that we ourselves had to play the film through from the beginning, to get to the point where we were going to work that day. In order to know what the sound volume needs to be.
BN: Because everyone does it.
JB: Yeah, your brain just says “Don’t need that, filter, filter”. And that’s the film really.
BN: You kind of had to leave people on that sweet spot between being cognizant of it, being overwhelmed by, it and ignoring it?
JB: It was a very hard thing. We spent about six months in post, making film one, and completely comprehensively making the soundscape of that and doing a mix of it – without any of the bad sound from over in the camp. And then we spent another four months, so that film kind of exists (film one) separately and then film two was added on over a period of about four months and the first pass took about a month, adding things in, and sixth, seventh passes were maybe a few days and we put more stuff in. And then the last four or five passes were just taking stuff out, and just playing the film from beginning to end many, many, many times and gauging where the line is and how much you need to hear whatever you’re hearing.
BN: And as a sound designer, how do you design the sound of Auschwitz? How do you take on that?
JB: Well, I quickly realised I had to research, an awful lot. And it was reading witness testimony. I needed to know what the birds and the bees and the right automobiles were and what kind of guns they use. Like they weren’t from the front line, you know: The good guns went to the front line, they used the first world war guns there and things like that.
But it was mostly understanding the events that took place, reading witness testimony and guard testimony from the trials, and making an enormous document that documented all the scenarios that happened there.
Understanding things like, on average, there were 80 to 90 gunshots daily. Executions by gunshot at cell block 11, and how far that was – the distance, and what that would sound like.
And so going and recording gunshots at the correct distance with the correct acoustics, and reading witness testimony and understanding events that happened between guards and prisoners, and how the deaths and brutality took place – so that I could go about figuring out how to make that because none of that sound exists.
So that was it. A really difficult process of trying things with actors, and realising that in such a documentary format, that didn’t really work. And what we ended up doing was going out into the real world, going to places where bad stuff happens and recording sounds of people in pain or shouting, or high on adrenaline, and in many different languages. And kind of repurposing that, making them into little nuggets of sound to make these little radio plays to put in the background.
BN: I guess there’s no other way than immersing yourself in that. The factual accuracy as well is huge. To me, it seemed like it ramps up over time in the period the film covers. Because he’s obviously the Commandant, and he’s building new bits, and then trains start to be a factor of it.
Some way into the film, you start hearing locomotives, and of course you know what that means, but they’re not there at the beginning, so the horror steps up as the machine of mass murder ramps up.
JB: Yeah, during that time period, it is accurate. There is a train that does go past when you first go inside the house at the beginning of the film. But by the end of the film, by winter, there were – I don’t know the exact number -but it was an enormous level of industry, as the film sort of narrates.
BN: Well, it’s a staggering piece of work, which if you’ve seen it: It kicks the crap out of you and it stays with you for days.
JB: Try working on it!
(not) The Favourite
BN: I want to make sure we have time. My job this morning is to try and keep us to time. I could do this all day. So much I want to talk to you about.
So we have some questions from our audience, that I want to make sure we get to.
There’s one here that kind of mirrors my experience because Falco Flows talks about how he placed a bet on it when he’d seen Zone of Interest. And the night after I saw it, I also went on SkyBet, which I hadn’t done before (18+, be gambleaware, when the fun stops, stop). I went on SkyBet and I put a tenner on it to win the Oscar. ‘Cos it wasn’t the favourite!
JB: No, not at all. You could have got 14 to one at one point!
BN: After the BAFTAs. It still wasn’t the favourite. It’s free money! Honestly, I made 45 pounds on that, so thank you!
JB: My wife had to nudge me, even when they announced who the winner was.
BN: Did she tell you that she had money on it?
JB: No, she didn’t. Afterwards, she said “I just made 2,000 pounds!”. Paid for the party!
BN: I don’t want to get all ‘magazine show’ about it, but maybe we should.
So, once you’ve received your nomination, is there a moment where you think, hang on, I might be in with a shout here, or does one not allow oneself to think that?
JB: No, because for starters, there’s an Oscar nominations luncheon that you go to, it’s amazing, and they drill you there that the nomination is the win, and so I didn’t want to go to America and come back empty-handed and feel disappointed – Because what an achievement getting an Oscar nomination. So I didn’t for one minute think that we would win, not at all, it was utterly shocking.
BN: And you weren’t the favourite. And SkyBet can’t be wrong!
Actually, there’s something – and it’s not specifically about Zone of Interest. Someone mentions another piece of work that is fabulous. Bradley Williams asks “How did you find the sound textures for the craft in Nope? And what was the feeling you had when you found it?”
JB: Do you know, most of Nope was because it was – I first spoke to Jordan at the end of COVID. And I couldn’t go to America. And so, much of it we did on a zoom call. And much of it I just did with my mouth. And I said “What about when the monster sucks them up?” It was rubbing the foam, that thing, but a big one of those [pointing to headset mic pop shield].
So it was all deep. And and the monster’s noise is me making clicky noises. Stuff like that. And a lot of the textures were to make the thing sound like “Am I hearing wind or am I hearing people screaming?”.
I recorded people on a rollercoaster at Six Flags amusement park in LA, and then found what the musical frequency of that was, pitched the winds from some wind recordings at the same thing. So it sounded like a whistle of a wind or a rollercoaster. And then got a bunch of actors to do the roller coaster ‘happy scream’ and then when I did that they would sound like they were in deadly pain, but at the same kind of pitch as the wind and the happy sounds.
So that allowed us to blend the sort of “Is it nice? Is it ambient? Is it – what is it?”. And so when you watch Nope for the second time you’re like, oh my god, I thought that was wind the first time I watched it.
BN: A lot of the other questions are around the sound of The Zone of Interest. Actually, this is a good question: James Ridgway asks, “Was the lack of score in Zone of Interest always the case, or was that a journey? And is that also the case with how it’s largely in mono?”.
That’s a thing to think about as well: we’ve spoken about, not so much the score, we’ll come to that, but also the fact that it isn’t an Atmos experience.
JB: Well, yeah, I actually did an Atmos mix, and everything was all flying around the room, and when the camera was looking away from the camp, the sound of the camp would be behind us. And it wasn’t sitting right, and when I played it to John, he felt it was somewhat sensationalising the material.
After he left, I hit the mono button and had a listen to that and I was like, wow. And the next day – I thought for ages “Should I tell him this?” But I said I hit the mono button and it just sounded much more like a document, like a thing that actually happened.
It brought everything together. And he was like, “Let me hear it”. And he was like, yeah, we’re doing mono. And I was like, please don’t do mono! I’ll be laughed out of the engineers club, I can’t do a mono film!
BN: You’d have to surrender your, your AMPS membership at that point.
JB: Yeah. So we went for nothing in the rear, it’s all very, very 60 percent width on the stereo, so it’s a near-mono mix.
But the only two pieces of score (apart from the red in the middle, which is also Mica) is the score at the beginning of the film is entirely in the room.
And, and that’s kind of us, and that’s you, and that’s your way in and out of it. But there was, James, score at the beginning when we made film one, Mica Levy actually wrote a score that accompanied that.
And it was then finding, when we came to put the troublesome sounds on it, it basically meant that the music said this didn’t really happen. So, we ended up realising, unfortunately, that the entirety of the film did not suit having music on it, only as a book-end.
BN: That’s fascinating.
I genuinely think it’s moved the craft along a bit.
JB: Well, John really knows how to tell stories with sound. And, he definitely has always encouraged me to go out and record stuff yourself, because that’s when you – we learned this on Under The Skin: Record things yourself and then you find all the fortuitous happy accidents that that you would never otherwise discover.
But if you’re sitting in front of a text prompt, you’re never going to get to some weird, spurious sort of, you know, shovel digging sound or something that that can really do an awful lot of making the scene feel believable, because it has stuff you wouldn’t normally put in a film in it.
BN: We have our 30 Second warning!
Are there any questions in the room that need a radio mic?
[Audience Member]: From hearing about the production process on both Under the Skin and Zone of Interest, they’re very long lens and it’s sort of almost semi reality TV, sort of ‘let people kind of get on with it’.
How did that affect the post process? Given that sort of fixed perspective on the microphone.
JB: I can only speak about post on sound. But very much John was saying to me at the beginning “We need to capture the sound of people in a house”. Normally on a film the primary goal is catch the dialogue.
And because the cameras weren’t exactly hidden. They were hidden in plain sight with, with dressing. And we came up with a solution that we would put in every ceiling of every room. It was a properly built house you could live in. And we split the ceiling up into four quadrants.
We put a 416 directional shotgun mic – pointing down into the room, and before every set up we’d guess where the best places were for it to point. So the sound, primarily, of the film is people in a house including their footsteps, their teacup going down, and the dialogue – and that’s what gives it (along with the long lens) a sort of voyeuristic, realistic way of watching people: observation.
BN: So there’s a chunk of visual effects budget, presumably, that is getting rid of those microphones after-the-fact?
JB: They actually said this is a first – sound can have a VFX budget! They drew a line on the ceiling, and they’re like “No microphone below that, and you’re good” .
BN: I think that’s sadly all we have time for. I could do this all day. Alas time is against us.
It remains only for me to say Johnnie. What a piece of work!
You’ve got something coming out soon. Another Yorgos?
JB: Kinds of Kindness. I’m going to Cannes tomorrow for the premiere of that on friday. Tech check tomorrow evening at 2am… Brilliant.
BN: That’s another Yorgos, Emma Stone project?
JB: Another Yorgos, Emma Stone. Very funny. And I’ve been working with his wife, the actress Ariane Labed, who also has a film premiering at Cannes in the Certain Regard competition: September Says, which is an adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s book, Sisters. Which is fantastic.
BN: Well, in true chat show host style, I wish you luck with both of those!
Johnnie, thank you for joining us this morning. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you all for coming.
JB: Thanks Ben. Thank you all for sparing a bit of time to come and listen.
Thanks to The Media Production & Technology Show, which returns to Olympia London on May 14th and 15th 2025
