Joe Kraemer

Joe Kraemer has worked with various reputable filmmakers including JJ Abrams, Channing Tatum, John Sayles, Tom Cruise, Georgia Tennant & Douglas Trumbull. Joe’s music can be heard in well-known feature films including Jack Reacher, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, The Way of the Gun and TV shows including the Romanian cop satire Comrade Detective (TV Series) directed by Rhys Thomas for A24 on Amazon Prime and the supernatural Creeped Out (TV Series) co-produced by BBC & DHX Media. Most recently he wrote the music to the dramatic thriller The Man Who Killed Hitler & Then Bigfoot directed by Robert Krzykowski and starring Sam Elliott, released in theaters February 8th, 2019.

Joe has been scoring films since the age of 15, when he composed the soundtrack for high school classmate Scott Storm’s The Chiming Hour, a feature-length indie shot on Super 8 in 1986. It was during this time that he first met a young writer named Christopher McQuarrie, a meeting that would lead to three career-defining projects for Kraemer, The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher, and the upcoming Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.

Kraemer would leave high school behind to attend the renowned Berklee School of Music in Boston to study Film Composing. Kraemer’s first real ‘industry’ gig was scoring the NBC/Warner Brothers pilot The Underworld, written and produced by Christopher McQuarrie, shortly following McQuarrie’s Oscar win for The Usual Suspects. Though the series was not picked up, the pilot was repurposed as a TV movie, where it has gained a small, cult following.

Kraemer and McQuarrie would team for the first career-defining moment The Way of the Gun, McQuarrie’s debut as a feature film director. A modest showing at the box-office relegated the film to cult-status, but the film would be a favorite for ‘temp-scoring’ by music editors. Ron Howard relied on the score heavily as temp music for his Best Picture film A Beautiful Mind, so much so that he included Kraemer’s music in the deleted scenes on the DVD and Blu-Ray.

In the years following The Way of the Gun, Kraemer carved out an eclectic career scoring all manner of films, from documentaries to television movies to action and horror films. He has written music for over 100 films, TV movies, episodic television, and film shorts, some 40 films just for The Hallmark Channel/Larry Levinson Productions alone! Strong melodic writing and superb dramatic sensibilities have kept him at the forefront of their rotation, and highlights include his scores for John Putch’s The Poseidon Adventure and A Time to Remember, the Mystery Woman series of ten films, and westerns such as Hard Ground, Lone Rider and The Trail to Hope Rose. He has also written the music for The Hitcher II and Joyride 2 for director Louis Morneau, and six films with writer-producer Mark Altman, including House of the Dead 2, The Thirst and All Souls Day.

Kraemer’s close artistic partnership with Altman led to scoring duties for Altman’s TV series Femme Fatales, a sexy homage to film noir and other genres for HBO/Cinemax. Kraemer also wrote the score
for the prestigious documentary An Unreasonable Man, an Oscar-shortlisted feature about Ralph Nader for directors Steven Skrovan and Henriette Mantell.

Kraemer received rave reviews in 2015 for his music in Dawn Patrol & also for 2015’s biggest summer box office release Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. He was the WINNER of 2016’s “Discovery Composer of the Year” Award at the World Soundtrack Awards in Ghent, Belgium.