“It had to be technical rather than emotive”: Mica Levi on their The Zone of Interest score

The screen is black as Mica Levi’s overture kicks in. The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning drama about the banal domestic lives of an Auschwitz commandant and his family, begins with a roiling liquid bath of synths and voices that descend steadily in pitch. In the black box of the cinema, it offers an airy, distorted wall of sound reflecting the weightlessness of bodies in free fall. As the musical pitch sinks and the heightened chirping of birds takes over, we drop directly into the hellish paradise of a Höss family picnic. 

Glazer’s chilling family drama deals in moments of extreme cognitive dissonance such as this one. We watch as SS officer Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their young children enjoy a seemingly idyllic family life in a house on the edge of a Nazi concentration camp, wilfully unaffected by the horrors being enacted on the other side of the wall. Glazer also keeps us at a purposeful distance from the terror, with only sound designer Johnnie Burn’s dread-inducing soundscape of ambient sounds from Auschwitz to offer sonic clues to the tragedy lying just outside of the frame. 

For a film in which what we hear speaks volumes over what we see, Levi’s score is a pitch-black directive, guiding us into the film’s heart of darkness only to lead us back out again in the black-screen finale. The British composer, who is behind some of the most formally inventive and wildly anarchic film scores in recent years, has crafted music that is all the more effective for its sparseness. Whether in this vertigo-inducing overture, a red-screen sequence in Hedwig’s flower beds, or that finale, Levi’s synths and vocals are largely used to accompany the film’s instances of cinematic abstraction. Helping to shake the audience out of being lulled by the humdrum nature of domestic life under fascism, these moments ask us to consider what we are watching, and how we are watching it.

Since The Zone of Interest premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the coveted Grand Prix, Levi hasn’t done many interviews. When we meet over coffee at the BFI Southbank café in London, they tell me that once the film was finally out in the world, “the emotions came all at once. I was frightened by the darkness that I felt the end piece of music contained. I don’t totally understand it, to be honest. That darkness that was obviously at bay, or somewhere less conscious during the making of the score, caught up with me. It was a really difficult time and I had a bit of an existential experience.”

The film’s ending sees past and present collide, as we move between the window displays of Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in the present day and Rudolf Höss’s violent retching. It’s unsurprising to hear Levi speak of the darkness contained in the final piece of music, which accompanies a radiant black screen and stretches through to the closing credits. It seems to release the muffled terror just audible from the other side of the wall into a powerfully discordant choral section: a compressed scattering of voices that register like horrifying shrieks in the dark. The film’s music supervisor, Bridget Samuels, brought together a choir of singers based on their contrasting voices and styles. “We had some fixed, notated pieces, but we also had space to record other things, like shouting, swoops, laughter,” Levi says. “We experimented with different extremes and textures.”

Levi remembers sending Glazer an idea for the music for The Zone of Interest back in 2016, a couple of years after the British director first started looking into adapting Martin Amis’s 2014 novel. Later, Levi spent a year in the studio alongside Glazer and editor Paul Watts, working on the score and sitting in on the edit, an ­experience Levi describes as “thrilling”. For one, the edit was constantly changing, an intentional part of Glazer’s working process stemming from his refusal to lock in a film too early and thereby shut down its potential. Nothing was fixed and everyone was learning as they went along. In trying to work out what music could possibly score the film, the team tried everything. They went “as modern as possible – high-tech, electronic – which made it very sci-fi straight away”. They went all-American. They tried placing sub-basses all the way through. They tried horror film music. “No stone was left unturned,” Levi says. 

One of the major epiphanies during these sessions was that the music had to be really carefully thought out. “It couldn’t just work on a subliminal level,” Levi says, “it had to be technical rather than emotive.” The music was also interfering with the sound design, which is thick with realistic details of life at Auschwitz, as dispassionately presented as the footage from the hidden cameras scattered around the set. Much of the original music that Levi had worked on over the years was eventually jettisoned. But too much has been made of this fact, they suggest, particularly given that many of these ideas were condensed into the overture anyway. “I don’t feel any attachment to that music. You just have to let go of it. Jon and Paul had to work with hours of material, days of the stuff. You could cut several different films out of that material alone… You’re letting go of something, but it’s for the greater good of the film. When something clicks, you can’t imagine it any other way.”

What did become clear early on was that there would be voices on the score. Another formative decision was Glazer’s choice to frame the story through a 21st-century lens. “He was talking to me about the proximity of the camera – a Big Brother-style CCTV distance – and filming in crisp HD. What might this mean musically? High-definition is not really my area, but I started exploring what a musical zoom might sound like.” There are many ways you might go into this, Levi explains. You can do it with volume, or by applying effects. They chose to descend in pitch, submerging us in the action while setting a distinctive mood, in many ways resembling a traditional cinematic overture. 

“I think music operates in the film in a directional way. It takes you down as the pitch gradually descends, then you’re underneath with these bellows,” Levi observes, referring to the deep, electronically manipulated human voices that punctuate the night-time sequences with a young resistance worker. Then, right in the middle of the film, in a remarkable, red-colour sequence, “You are in a place behind the place, bursting through something”. The result of a “happy accident” in the editing suite, the abstract colour panels were intended to be as far removed as you could possibly get from the harsh reality of HD. In one of the most arresting scenes in the film, ravishing shots of Hedwig’s immaculate flower garden are accompanied by the buzzing of a swarm of bees and the wails of human suffering, unleashing a daylight horror of sunflowers and screams. A single red dahlia dissolves into the frame, leaving a flat, blood-red colour panel and the weight of silence, which is quickly punctuated by two short, sharp bloops. 

The “zits”, as Levi calls these deviant electronic sounds, drew on some surprising sources. “This is going to sound mad, but I was thinking of Viz comics, gunge, Mr Blobby: that was my thought process. Absurdity doesn’t make sense. As people exploring this unimaginable human story, and as people making it not having any answers but surely only questions, something as abstract as music won’t give you those answers.” They sketch me a diagram of the film music, quickly, on a scrap of paper. Later, I wonder what kind of a space this “place behind the place” is; I find it too abstract at first to get a hold of. “I suppose in the wake of total punishment and violence you might trip out, numb out, transcend something that takes you into another realm… into somewhere unknown, just behind the screen.” It sounds to me like dissociation, when the mind flees to escape harm.

The sole light of the film flickers brightest at night, in the figure of a young local girl hiding apples for the starving concentration camp prisoners. Filmed on a high-resolution infrared camera, the images are inflected with a rumble of guttural electronic burps – the bellows Levi talks about. A digitally manipulated human voice, which the team nicknamed ‘yums’, these sounds are meant to encapsulate the immensity and danger of the mission; something like a deep belly moan. The character was based on a real-life resistance fighter, Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, to whom Glazer dedicated the film in his Oscar’s speech, paying poignant tribute to “the girl who glows in the film as she did in life”. It’s on one of these terrifying night missions that this girl finds a piece of music in a tin box, which she takes home and plays on the piano. Written by Holocaust survivor Joseph Wulf while imprisoned in Auschwitz, the song ‘Sunbeams’ can be heard alongside Wulf’s own voice, offering a rare contemporary Jewish perspective within a film in which the perpetrator, and not the victim, is brought into sharper definition.

Discussions about The Zone of Interest began not long after Under the Skin (2013) wrapped. Glazer’s first film in nine years, his science-fiction noir about an alien succubus in Glasgow demanded a fresh start from the British director, and Levi was part of that. A young, classically trained composer with no experience of making film music, they had been DJing and performing with their experimental pop band, Micachu and the Shapes, when music supervisor Peter Raeburn played Glazer a section of Chopped & Screwed, the band’s live concert LP with the London Sinfonietta. Glazer knew immediately that he had to call Levi in.

The experience of working on Under the Skin changed Levi’s life completely, igniting a collaboration that so far has spanned four films, including two shorts: The Fall (2019), a seven-minute semi-prelude to The Zone of Interest, and Strasbourg 1518 (2020), a dance film made during lockdown and set to Levi’s absolute banger of a club track. “I can’t really imagine Jon not being in my life,” they say. “He wants me to push myself, push what’s possible. It gets material out of you.” 

After Under the Skin, directors came knocking. Following a screening at the Venice film festival, jury member Pablo Larraín asked Levi to score Jackie (2016), his mournful, expressionistic portrait of Jackie Kennedy Onassis in the traumatic aftermath of her husband’s murder.

“I like it when working on a film feels like being in a band and being in a band feels like a film,” Levi says when I ask them about composing for the club and the cinema. With Micachu and the Shapes, they became known for their resourceful use of incidental sounds, home-made instruments, and found objects – including the infamous sound of a vacuum cleaner on the track ‘Turn Me Well’ – to create dynamic aural textures. Inspired by musique concrète, an experimental genre that emerged in the 1940s, this approach to integrating found sounds into musical contexts has travelled over into their film scores. In Alejandro Landes’s Colombian war film Monos (2019), the sound of air blown into a glass bottle becomes a potent motif. “I’ve used that sound for years, I love it. I blew into a bottle and made a synth out of it. While I was recording, there also happened to be these birds outside…” With the score for Monos, the intention was to capture the resourcefulness of child soldiers navigating their way through the chaos of modern warfare. “What felt striking to me was the textures of the costumes and what they had, which was nothing. Weapons, tarp, a knife, bits of metal and plastic. I wanted to draw on these materials.” 

In Janicza Bravo’s Zola (2020), based on a real-life crime saga involving a pair of strippers that went viral on Twitter, the scattered logic born of trawling the internet is brought to life in Levi’s endorphin-releasing bleeps. A key reference point was Hieronymus Bosch’s oil-painting triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, which Bravo saw as integral to the atmosphere of absurdity on Zola’s Floridian road trip. So too were the healing vibrations of sound baths. Levi worked in the “heavenly” sounds of the harp and the sweet and sour prickliness of nursery rhymes and children’s toys. Cuteness was a major drive here: an intentionally jarring decision for a neon-lit crime comedy that gets high off the riskiness of sex work. Hellishness is also present in the loud snares: “If you’re up for it they energise you,” Levi says. “Otherwise it’s like a kick in the head.” In Zola, Levi refracts the anarchy of social media through the motif of child’s play, in a Fisher-Price symphony of toy boxes, xylophones and a single wood block.

In some ways, Jackie is Levi’s most traditional score so far. When talking about the process, they proffer a notion (not entirely seriously) of “method composing”. Endlessly googling pictures of Kennedy Onassis on the internet, they try to create the kind of music they imagined the First Lady would like. This is typical of Levi’s approach to composing for the cinema by drawing from anywhere but film scores. From Bosch to Mr Blobby, ideas plucked from art or pop culture tend to resonate more deeply for Levi than conventional film scores and aren’t freighted with the same anxiety of influence. That’s probably a good thing because the answers, it turns out, are already there in the film.

Often compared to Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti, who both feature on Stanley Kubrick’s soundtracks, Levi’s distinctive take on contemporary classical has been hailed as otherworldly. But it couldn’t be more rooted in the elemental sounds of everyday life and the moment-by-moment reactions of characters. In Under the Skin, Zola and Jackie, Levi burrows into the heads of off-colour, off-kilter women who are stuck in a fog of confusion, pill-popping and grief. One of their signature sounds – the turpentine-smooth, slightly sinister slide of glissando strings – captures this sudden descent into the subconscious by slithering between different emotional registers. If I had to try to characterise Levi’s distinctive approach to film sound, I might find it in this rising and sinking of pitch: a drilling down, deep into the unknown.