An Interview with Joe Kraemer - Composer of Mission: Impossible, Jack Reacher and more

By James Garbett

Picture by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77762561

You may not know of the name Joe Kraemer but we’re willing to bet you’ve heard some of his music. From scoring huge mega-hits such as Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher to TV shows such as “Creeped Out”, as well as composing for some of the highly popular Big Finish Doctor Who audio dramas, Joe Kraemer is an insightful and articulate voice into the world of film scoring. We chatted to Kraemer about how to break into the highly competitive industry and some of his favourite soundtracks.

Q&A

As a fellow John Williams fan, pick your top three John Williams scores (if you can! and why they’re your favourite)

Star Wars - brilliant composing, themes that move me and excite me - I’d include all 9 of his scores if I could

Superman - his first score that I bought - very emotional, heartfelt writing coupled with amazing action writing and heroic themes

Harry Potter 1 - magical, mysterious, moving. The final cue “Leaving Hogwarts” is genius.

I also really love the concert suite of his score to the Reivers - narration and all!!

What was the moment you knew you wanted to be a film composer? Was there a particular “Eureka” moment where you realised you wanted to do this as a career?

I started scoring movies when I was about 15. I was acting in an 8mm film being made by a kid I met in high school - he was in college and I was in 9th grade - named Scott Storm. During an early day of shooting, I asked him what he did for music in his movies. My dad was a hobbyist musician so we had a home studio with a four-track and some synths, and I thought maybe I could use that to make some music for this film I was acting in. Scott loved the idea and so I ended up writing the score. This was very primitive technology by today’s standards - there was no way to sync the four-track to the 8mm film except by luck, and I had no craft at timing out the beats of music to the frames of film. But it was a start.

The real “eureka” moment came for me when I was a student at Berklee College of Music and I learned there was a whole science to film composing that I had been totally unaware of - a system of counting frames and counting beats that allowed for very precise synchronization between the music and the film. Coupled with the opportunity to learn orchestration, conducting, and music editing, I fell in love with the whole process and decided to pursue film music as a career.

What’s the best part about being a film composer?

When I have the luxury of being able to conduct live musicians, that is the best part. Second is hearing something performed in a concert. I also really enjoy meeting fans of film music and teaching students about the craft.

Was there anything you learned as a sound editor/sound mixer early in your career that you then applied to film composing?

Yes, I think I have a pretty nice perspective on what the final elements in a mix are going to sound like while I’m writing the score, because I’ve done all the aspects of the sound mix, from foley to dialog editing to sound effects to mixing. These experiences give me a perspective that goes beyond just the music and helps inform decisions based on the entire sonic landscape. For example, in the motorcycle chase in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, I knew that the motorcycle sounds were going to occupy certain frequencies in the sonic spectrum, so I needed to rely on frequencies outside those when I wanted to music to cut though the mix.

Kraemer, J., 2015. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. [CD] La-La Land Records and Paramount Pictures.

What advice would you give to someone who would like to be a film composer? And may I ask what the key piece of advice is that you give to your students?

The business is always changing and it’s much different now than when I first started out in the mid-1990’s. Back then, the principal asset seemed to be musical literacy and versatility - a film composer needed to be able to handle any kind of music and was expected to be a jack-of-all-trades. Now, it seems directors want composers to be much more individualized and have their own distinctive sound. Filmmakers also seem more interested in working with musicians who are not career film composers than they used to be. Rock stars have moved into film music as a way to keep working without touring, for example. So I encourage folks interested in getting into film music to write the kind of music that is close to their heart and to make albums that are not film scores, but to create an image of themselves as a recording artist. They should distribute those albums as widely as possible and hope that a director temps a film with their music and then hires them to score the film.

As for what I tell my students, you have to take my class to find that out!

What are your thoughts on the recent discussion regarding the epidemic of temp music in big Hollywood scores, where filmmakers will use other films or popular music when editing the film and then get composers to replicate that particular track as close as possible?

I’m very frustrated with the current landscape of “Hollywood” - not just for composers but for all the disciplines of the craft. The corporate mindset and reliance on pre-existing properties has really narrowed the scope of what Hollywood is making and how they are making it. Temp scoring has always existed and always been a hurdle for composers - just look at what Alex North had to deal with on 2001:A Space Odyssey. Digital editing has made it possible for music editors to definitively pre-score a film with temp music now, and the composer is just a sort of reverse-engineer who has to create a non-litigious version of that temp rather than come in and create something new from whole cloth. At its best, my work was given that freedom, such as The Way of the Gun and Jack Reacher. Now, I’m only interested in projects where I can be free from the tyranny of a temp score, for the most part. I’m not interested in just cloning other work, even my own, if I can help it. Now obviously, there are circumstances beyond my control where I must give in to the pressures of the temp score, but I am not fond of that.

Another factor for me is that I am not a fan of certain sounds and styles of film music that seem to be the current fad. Somewhere along the way, I accidentally became a purist of sorts, and I discovered I prefer a more honest, less “produced” sound. A full orchestra in Abbey Road Studio One is my ideal “sample library”. I use synths and samples because I have to, not because I necessarily want to. This has kind of set me apart as something of a maverick or a “retro” composer, which is something I just have to live with I guess…

What’s the hardest or most difficult thing about being a film composer?

The almost constant rejection. It really is a life of constant rejection with occasional moments of being accepted. Seriously, don’t pursue this life if you can’t handle being rejected several times a day.

And that’s not just being rejected for jobs - it’s also having cues rejected, being told no about budget and schedule, seeing bad reviews about your projects and scores, and being replaced by another composer. One really has to love music and the highlights of being a composer to put up with the difficulties that also come with that life.

Is there any particular piece in your career that you’re particularly proud of?

I am very proud of my score to the 1927 silent film SUNRISE, which I wrote in 2016 for The Dallas Chamber Symphony Orchestra. I’ve also written 18 orchestral pieces for Audio Network that have allowed me to explore music that films have not so much. Of course, I will always be proud of ROGUE NATION too.

Where do you start with a piece? What is the composition process like for you?

I approach film composing from a story-telling perspective. I look at the characters and the storyline and begin making musical decisions based on those factors. For example, I wrote music for a series of audio dramas that were a spin-off of DOCTOR WHO called “The Paternoster Gang”. This series was a darkly funny set of adventures about 3 characters in Victorian London who had strange encounters and solved various mysteries and crimes. I wanted to create a theme for these characters that captured the historical era, the comedic sense, but also the mystery. The choice of instrumentation - orchestral, with a focus on woodwinds - helped set the historical element. The melody itself had a jaunty quality that placed the comedic setting, and the harmonic language (being in a minor key) kept it in the realm of mystery.

I use all the skills I learned as a music student to try and come up with musical elements for a score that help tell the story - I am most interested in the music working as something of a “commentary track” on the film for the audience, albeit a subconscious one.

You can listen to Joe Kraemer’s discography on Spotify by clicking the button below, thank you to Joe for his time.