MRH: Some time ago I spoke with the music producer on Blade 2, and he said, ‘We've got Marco Beltrami to write a complete orchestral score, and then we basically put it into ProTools, and then manipulate it.' I guess that's one of the more popular options today: everything is recorded on a soundstage, and then it's put on a computer, where it's carefully tweaked and shaped and altered in order to suit the film – not just in terms of what scenes have been edited, but also what kind of tonal colours or sound effects you want to add.

Do you find that process has become more commonplace?

JF: Yeah, but I like being a part of that. That's the fun part; it's what you can do with the recordings once you get them into the computer. I really enjoy that part a lot. Obviously, you're ending up with scores that you can't go out and perform live, but it's really exciting what you can do with the manipulation of sounds when compared to the 1950, where you had manipulated tape and primitive electronic music.

There's just a whole new world of possibilities now.

MRH: One of the novel aspects of the horror genre is how it's always been a venue where composers could experiment. I don't think it's been as easy in other genres to take principles like aleatoric music and actually apply them in such extreme examples, and I wonder if you have any thoughts on why the horror genre has been so welcoming to such ideas?

JF: To clarify it, or to even go further with that, it's like basically you get to write music that no one would ever pay you to write if it wasn't for horror! Clearly, that has to do with the simple aspects of what is dissonant, and what is dissonant either in our culture or in a physical way. For some reason we have a culture that likes dissonance in drama, so we tend to have more experimentation there; but with tonal music, it's a more restrictive and more defined area to work.

MRH: Do you consider Stay Alive your most experimental score thus far?

JF: I think in terms of experimental, Thirt3en Ghosts was as experimental when I did it, and I'm actually writing my most experimental score right now, which is for an action film called Primeval, taking place in Burundi. I went to South Africa because I knew I needed very traditional African musicians to play on it, and I spent two weeks foraging around, finding new players with a mobile studio, and recording in places that probably no one could imagine you could record. I came back with an amazing collection of sounds which now I'll weave into a score.

MRH: When you have concrete ideas, do you record them first, or do you or wait until you start to shape the score? (Themes, styles, etc.)

JF: This is the second time that I've recorded before I started working to picture. The first time was on Stay Alive, where I wrote everything down – themes, ideas – for the recording session, and then I started working to picture, but with African music, you can't write it down, so instead I spent about two months researching, learning, and finding tones and instruments and groups of instruments that I wanted. Then knowing in my head the phrases I wanted, I worked one-on-one with all the players to get this collection of sounds and rhythms. There was just no way to notate it.

MRH: How come there's no way?

JF: It probably could be notated, but there's different ways African players could read it, because African music doesn't have a history of notated music.

MRH: It's music that's learned and retained by ear?

JF: It's passed on from generation to generation… and much of African music relies on subtle use of overtones, which I don't even think you could notate. When you're dealing with a mouth-bow – it looks like a small archery bow that you bite on one end and then bow it - you open and close your mouth to create the shape of the overtones that are happening over the fundamental notes. I think at that point, you're outside the realm of notation.

Maybe this is sort of what we were talking about: when you get into other types of music, our western ideas of writing down this note and this beat starts to break down in a certain point of experimentation. I know that in aleatoric music, we had to reinvent a lot of the way things were written down.

MRH: When using electronic effects and synths with orchestra, is there an order that you use when composing?

JF: The synthesizers tend to be a very responsive, intuitive area to work. In other words, I might think, ‘Oh, I'll enjoy working with this synthesizer,' and I just start dialing away, leading myself down a path with my knowledge of synthesis, but it's very intuitive until I get to something that I like.