By all appearences, Joe Kraemer, whose prolific body of work and experience in the industry should qualify him the right to be jaded, is simply and candidly a nice guy. His energy and enthusiasm about music and films is a bit infectious, his passion focused and imparted clearly. With scores for more than forty productions, including The Way of the Gun and Monday among others to his credit, the film composer doesn't shy from admitting his love of orchestral scores and sites the influence of greats like Jerry Goldsmith (Gremlins, The Omen, L.A Confidential) and John Williams (Jaws, Schindler's List, Memoirs of a Geisha) on his take about scoring.

After dropping his daughter off at school, Kraemer graciously spent time to talk about the importance of Star Wars, friendships that turned into artistic collaborations and his day-to-day life as a working composer.

SM: Why is it that you make art and music? What inspires you to do that?

JK: To a certain degree, it started out as a hobby as a kid, you know thirteen, fourteen, even younger playing the piano and writing songs. When I was sixteen, I met (Scott Storm), and I was acting in his movie. I told him that I had a little music studio, and when he heard that, he was excited because he realized he wouldn’t have to use Tangerine Dream records anymore for the scores to his movies. He sort of drafted me to start scoring his movies. He made them on Super 8 film in the woods behind his house—ghost stories, spooky movies. It just sort of progressed from there. I don’t think I ever decided, “Yes, I’m going to do art.” It wasn’t a conscious decision that I arrived at one day. I just got there step-by-step, you know? No step was ever so big that it was a scary decision: When it came time to go to college, I decided to go to (Boston’s Berklee College of Music). When I was at the music school, I decided to study their film music program. Then once I decided that I decided to come out to LA where my friends were. Once I was out here, I just got a job that I could sustain myself with and sound design on movies. That led to opportunities where I would run into filmmakers and get scoring opportunities. It was just kind of every step of the way was just a little decision.

SM: Was the piano the first instrument that you started working on?

JK: Yeah, I was like five. We had a piano, and so I would tinker around on it. Ironically, I guess, my parents went to see Star Wars. I would have been about six. I came home, and I started playing all the melodies from the movie on the piano, which my parents remember better than me. They tell me that story. They were sort of surprised that I came home and could pick up the tunes, could pick up the chords… My dad was a huge Beatles fan, and I was a big Star Wars nerd, so between those two influences, I grew up thinking of music and movies as being linked—the tunes of the Beatles and the concept of the movie score, which I used to listen to as a kid, the same way I used to listen to rock records.

SM: Presumably, (film) music is there to enhance the images, but how is it that the music stands alone too? Do the two become so married that you can’t see one without the other, or do they have to exist as separate entities?

JK: I certainly don’t want to wallpaper it, but by the same token, I want to support the movie. I don’t think it’s important for the music to stand on it’s own all the time. There are certain set pieces you can come up with as a composer that will stand on their own in the movie. You can probably take the theme, and make an arrangement of the theme that you could do in a classic orchestra and entertain the audience. But, to a certain degree, movie music can be fairly utilitarian. It doesn’t necessarily stand on its own as a whiz-bang concert piece. I don’t think that’s a slam against the music. The most important thing when you’re composing for a film is the film…

SM: Talking specifically about your film composition work, you start off in 1997 with The Underworld, that being a genre piece, and you went on to do a lot more genre pieces as well, literally three dozen pieces, which is amazing and incredibly prolific. So I was hoping you could talk about your process on all these different genre projects. Maybe I’m presuming, but is approaching a genre project different than approaching a traditional romantic comedy or a dramatic narrative?

JK: Only in terms of what colors you use tonally. I don’t think it’s any different in terms of trying to support the film…If you’re doing a comedy, you’re trying to have the music support the humor and not telegraph it or not squash it. If you’re doing a horror film, you want the music to support the tension; you don’t want to telegraph the scares. In a weird way, horror and comedy are almost the same thing: set-up and punch line, set-up and scare. I suppose the hardest thing to do is write scores for films that are trying to be realistic. Comedies and horror film genre pieces often create their own reality whereas a piece like The Way of the Gun was trying very hard to be realistic and not heightened. It was a long process trying to figure out the solution to music. Music by its nature is a completely unrealistic element. There’s not an orchestra playing ten feet to the left of you when you’re having a tender moment with your boyfriend or girlfriend. So if you’re trying to make a film about characters that are relating to each other on a completely real level, finding the tone for that music can be a real challenge.

SM: How does that affect that actual process though, knowing that some films create their own realities or like you said, with The Way of the Gun, the reality has to be developed in this collaborative process with the filmmaker?

JK: It’s just tough. With The Way of the Gun, (Christopher McQuarrie and I), the director and I, spent almost 11 months from beginning to end. We spent a good six months just trying different pieces, trying to figure out where music went, what kind of music it was and what the whole point of having music in the film was going to be. Some films it’s pretty easy. A horror film you kind of know—like this movie I did called House of the Dead II. It’s about a team of military commandos that infiltrate a college campus that’s been overrun by zombies. It’s a pretty heightened reality; it’s a pretty unrealistic situation, but it’s pretty obvious what the music has to do. You want military music to support the soldiers, and then you want scary music for the zombies. A movie like The Way of the Gun is about two criminals, two small time crooks who kidnap a pregnant woman and hold the unborn baby for ransom. She’s a surrogate mom for a mobster, not like Tony Soprano but more like a white-collar mafia guy. The situations in The Way of the Gun were much more delicate. The whole movie was staged, shot and written to be kind of realistic, and the process—the process is the same on any movie. You take a piece of music, you throw it up against the movie, you look at it. You might try some temporary music by other composers to see what generally is the kind of approach that’s going to work. Then once you get the ballpark of what you’re looking for then you can start composing original themes. Sometimes the movie tells you what to do, and sometimes you really have to dig for it. I would say The Way of the Gun was probably the hardest to find a solution for, and in a weird way, it’s been the one that most people have reacted to in a positive way. Maybe that says something.

SM: When you came in for The Way of the Gun, were you coming in at the scripting process? Were you seeing drafts of it?

JK: Yeah, I grew up with the filmmakers. I mean, I try not to read scripts because I feel like I’m scoring the film, not the script.

SM: Okay, okay.

JK: It’s a two-edged thing. I feel like if I read the script that colors how I’m going to see the film. The other thing is that generally the composer is brought on fairly late in the process. In some ways, the composer is the first outsider who will be working on the film, and to see the film as a film, see it sort of from the beginning, from scratch. To see it clean with no baggage attached to it. They weren’t on the set; they don’t know what kind of a nightmare it was to get that shot, or how the director changed it, how he wrote it or what he meant with it. You see the movie for what it is. If I read the script, that colors that a little bit. I’d rather react to the movie itself.

Now, with The Way of the Gun, I grew up with Chris so I read the script, and my wife (filmmaker Heidi Van Lier) was in the movie so I heard stories from the set. Then with Monday…I had originally written a variation of the story with the intention to direct it myself, but I really never got my time together to develop it properly. My wife liked the idea so she sort of took it over. I also played the lead character so I was on the set every day. When it came time to do the music, I was approaching the movie completely from the inside, which is a big challenge. It becomes very difficult to see the forest through the trees when you’re in the trenches of the film like that from beginning to end.

SM: I would think though that that would also give you a really interesting perspective--conversely, as challenging as that might be. That’s one thing about Monday that stands out. Because there was the adaptation of the Carpenters’ work, there was a really intimate feeling about the way the score was approached with character because you were playing the character. (The score) would have been completely different had you not been interior to that process.

JK: Monday is an interesting example on a lot of levels. It was not made like a conventional movie…It was self-financed; for all intents and purposes, it’s an experimental film. It’s an abstract movie about a guy who doesn’t—nobody who he runs into in his life speaks. There’s no dialogue. The music and the voiceover are the dialogue that’s in the film. We sort of could get away with a lot. Heidi cut the film listening to the Carpenters and persued the idea for a while of trying to license the Carpenter’s music for film festivals. But, it quickly became apparent that that wasn’t going to work financially or time wise within our schedules.

When we first developed the movie, I was going to score the film entirely with “muzak,” like easy listening music. Then when (Heidi) started cutting to the Carpenters, she really feel in love with the idea of the lyrics mirroring what’s going on in the scenes. At that point, easy listening, instrumental “muzak” was not going to cut it so we put the songs in with the lyrics. Then we watched the film, and we felt that the lyrics still weren’t telling enough of the story, and that’s sort of when we committed to the voiceover…Probably artistically, it’s for the best that I was involved from the beginning. Or, was it the best? I don’t know, but it worked out okay.

Some movies—if I’m just called in to write the score, and that’s all they want from me, it’s probably better if I’m not involved until the movie is almost done. But, Monday was an aberration from the norm for a composer. Same with The Way of the Gun frankly. It’s because I have such a long friendship with Chris that I was involved so early.

I’ve been on films where they call me on Monday, and by the next Friday, the movie is mixing. Monday morning I wake up, and I have no idea what I’m going to do that week. By Tuesday, I’m writing music for a film that I hadn’t even heard of the day before, and ten days later I’m done with it. That’s the other thing with film composing is oftentimes, you really have to be aware of your first reaction to things, be able to capture that and remember that. That can be very important when you’re down in the trenches writing the music for the middle of the movie, and you’ve got to get it done. It really helps to remember how you felt the first time and then be able to translate that feeling into music.

SM: Are there certain influences, certain themes or trends that you see yourself working with over and over again? It might be a completely unconscious process, something that you notice later on after the score is done.

JK: I certainly grew up loving orchestral scores and dismissing rock scores or jazz scores. I definitely have changed about that in my life as a composer. I see more potential for music outside the orchestral. Part of that is because I grew up loving space-fantasy films. If you’re going to do that kind of film, (orchestral is) still the way to go—to make a Lord of the Rings or Spiderman. But, I just did a movie called The Thrist about vampires, and the entire score was much more synthesized, ambient and techno, and that music seemed to sit better. The movie was shot on Super 16; it had a really cruddy look on purpose. The music, that rough, synthesized techno music, gave it a cruddy sound. An orchestra would probably sound too clean. To a certain degree, one is oftentimes involved in making a film for a target audience, and the target audience may not appreciate an orchestral score. That may not be what they want to hear. Not every piece of art is made for the artist. Sometimes it’s made for fulfill a quote, to target a specific audience. There’re 500 channels on TV so we’ve got to fill that up with material, and people get opportunities to work based on needs that need to be fulfilled with scheduling or broadcasting and not necessarily always generating, “Oh, I have a story I want to tell.”

SM: Do you feel that that diminishes the quality of the art at all though? Maybe I’m reading into it, but there seems to be an intimation that making something for an audience diminishes the art of it. There’s got to be a space you can negotiate between creations.

JK: Oh, absolutely…I’m saying that you’re starting point creation is not internal; it’s external. You’re still trying to say something artistically, but certain decisions about how you’re going to say it are provided externally. 

SM: In 2006, you did 14 productions.

JK: Wow.

SM: How do you manage it?

JK: I have a feeling that some of those I did in 2005, but they weren’t released until 2006. But, yeah, it’s tough. You have to dig in yourself, find something to say and try to say it differently than you said it the other dozen times. It helps when they’re different genres. I did a couple of Westerns; I did some chick flick for the Hallmark channel stuff; some mysteries—a bunch of those were a series of mystery movies about the same character.

SM: Mystery Woman.

JK: Yeah, Mystery Woman. That had a lot of recurring material: she had her theme, her snooping theme, her bookstore theme. That stuff was easier to generate over and over again. Other stuff was more challenging. You get the call, and you tackle the movie one minute at a time. If  you’re just diligent about working, getting up, getting the work done—I try to write about a minute of music an hour. I never reach that, but I work all day from morning until late at night. On a good day, I’ll get about eight to ten minutes done, but the average is about six minutes a day. But—let’s say a movie has 80 minutes of music in it, you divide that by six, you come up with about 14 days of work. That’s two days without a day off, which is fine. There’s a couple of days in there for fixes. The directors and producers will come in to preview stuff and give suggestions for changes, different things they would like to highlight in the score or drama. Then, after that, it’s gone and goes out the door to the mix and the airwaves. My brain empties it out, and then I start again.

I’m sure if you listen to those scores, they’ll be a through line because it’s all me. I’m the same person, making my musical commentary on each film. Hopefully they don’t sound identical to each other, but I’m certain there are similarities and a continuity in the voice in the films.

You try to be distinctive and original on each piece, approach it as its own thing and try not to repeat yourself too much.

For more information visit www.joekraemer.com.   

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