This is a Radio Atlantic. I'm Hunter Rosen.

The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glaser, which is up for a best picture this weekend,

is a movie told in two different ways. There's the movie you see and the one you hear.

The one you see involves a mother, a father, their five children, and their dog living an idyllic life,

in a big house with a big staff and a swimming pool and a lovely garden. But the film you hear and only get faint glimpses of throughout

tells you what's actually happening and just a warning, some of the sounds

you'll hear in this episode are disturbing. The zone of interest is set in

in 1943. The house and the garden are surrounded by a high wall.

And outside that wall, right outside that wall, is the outside of the wall. And outside that wall, right outside that wall, is the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The father of this family, Rudolph Haas, who is a real person, oversees the camp.

His wife Hedwick oversees the household

and mostly tries to ignore the sounds coming from the camp.

Which makes this movie, among other things,

a testimony to how humans can ignore evil,

even when it's incredibly loud and close.

I've known John for many years and we've done a lot of working together so we know kind of how we like to use sound and it's always in exploration.

But I think John was pretty clear that from the beginning that he didn't want to show any of the violence

So we knew that sound was going to be the way of doing that

But where we ended up with it was a lot more comprehensively based in sound than we had imagined.

This is Johnny Byrne. He helped sound design the zone of interest, and he's nominated for an Oscar.

The first month, I would say, of making that soundscape.

We were really quite reserved, and we didn't want to overdo anything,

...