MRH: How do you ensure that when you take an organic sound and make it more malleable that it doesn't degrade in the process?

JF: Degrade can be a good thing or a bad thing. A lot of the things I'm seeking for them to degrade. It's almost like a zombie character where you imagine there was this beautiful living person, and their skin is kind of falling, off but you'll see a little bit of the living beauty that used to be there, and I find sounds like that really creepy. That's part of it; you can hear that this was once beautiful, but it's not - it's wrong - and that's what I'm invoking.

MRH: Because you're familiar with a lot of digital effects, it makes it easier to create these sounds faster, but I wonder if you prefer the whole exploratory process where a lot of time is spent noodling around with different effects, and it doesn't matter if it takes several days or longer; it's just part of a process you enjoy.

JF: Yeah. If I have the time on a film, I may create a whole new process. If I'm on a real short schedule, there's usually some processes that I've been playing around with that I've been waiting for an opportunity to expand into a score, and there tends to be a sort of 'laboratory' at my studio, where there is a bunch of half-cooked sounds and ideas... When a film comes in, I'll look through the laboratory and go 'Ooo, wow. These two would get along really well,' and that's really a fun part of it.

MRH: With so many sounds available from synth libraries, why do you go through the trouble to create your original sounds, because I know you do record your own organic sounds and then build up a library of your own?

JF: Why go through all the troubles of being unique? It's sort of self-explanatory. I think it goes back to Alien Resurrection (1997), to be quite honest. There was a sound that I used probably four or five times in that score that was from a purchased sound library, and over the years since that film came out, I've heard that same sound on so many films, so many TV shows, and so many this-and-that, from commercials to everything, that there isn't a day where I get mad at myself for using it.

That isn't to say that someone's going to catch me doing it again in the future – I might just find something cool – but I really try to steer away from that... I'm here to make unique tones, and it's something that I really enjoy, too, and just as much as making the melodies and the concrete musical ideas....

MRH: I guess from a composer's standpoint, each time that stock sound is used by another, it weakens the impact of it's first or early appearances..

JF: Yeah. I'm not being hired by filmmakers to go buy a $400 package of sound to be pressed on a keyboard. That's not what I'm here to do. I'm here to develop a unique character for their film and hopefully the franchise and give it a permanent uniqueness that will let it stand apart. I don't always achieve that, but that's certainly where I set out.