Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512183
Recording in the dunes of Qatar for Dune: Part One, (2021).Photo by Mostafa Sheshtawy 34 M PS E . O R G Korey Pereira MPSE: Last we spoke on the record, you had just finished the sound on The Favourite. You've been quite a busy man since then! Can you tell us a bit about what you have been up to since then? Johnnie Burn: Wow. The Favourite was in 2018, so almost five years ago. After that, I worked on Waves, which was in 2019. That film was directed by Trey Edward Shults, who did Krisha and It Comes at Night. Waves was a really interesting project because it had the most amount of sync music, certainly that I've ever come across in a film. Even the PDF of the script had the music playing as embedded files. It was so integral to the way that story works. It was a film about a guy who accidentally killed his girlfriend and then it pivots after half an hour to the impact of that event on his sister's life and how she's treated differently at school because of it. That film had an enormous soundscape in the Dolby Atmos mix. I remember there being something like 35 different sync tracks. Kanye West and an awful lot of other interesting music, as well as a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Korey: So where did you finish that film? Johnnie: I finished that at Gigantic in New York, which is wonderful. It's a cool place. I think Walter Murch said he used it for three months. He didn't want to be sitting down the whole time, so they built a retractable floor that lowered down so that he could stand at the mix desk. That was pretty great. Korey: Thinking about The Favourite, it was very light on the music and really leaned into the natural soundscape that you created in the world. Whereas with Waves, it is very heavily music- driven. How do you change your approach when working on a film when music is such a central part of it? Johnnie: So, The Favourite was very much about creating a realistic world and recording all the ambiences that go with it. Waves was a much more subjective experience for the viewer which allows things to be less realistic and more hyper-realized. One of the fantastic things about Waves was when you put a loud piece of music in, you don't have to do a lot of work on all the other ingredients because you don't even hear the background. It was a completely different project. It was much more about getting all the different pieces of music and score to segue in a cool way. I had to create a kind of continuous energy throughout the film, basically with the mix. That was