Joe Kraemer’s career has encompassed music for film and TV – as well as audio adventures of Doctor Who for Big Finish. Perhaps best known for his work on Jack Reacher and the most recently released Mission: Impossible film, Rogue Nation, Kraemer chatted with Paul Simpson. In this part he discusses his current TV work – the series Creeped Out, which appears on CBBC in the UK – and click here for part 2, which discusses his travels in the TARDIS…

How did you get involved with Creeped Out?

Funnily enough it started with Doctor Who. I had done the score for The Way of the Gun 20 years ago and the film kind of flopped. People liked the work but it didn’t open many doors in the feature film scene. I carved a niche for myself as a TV composer and independent film composer, and then I got Jack Reacher, and some film music fans from around the world, in the advent of social media, reached out to me on Facebook and Twitter.

One of them was a director from the UK called Steve Hughes who is a huge film music fan and had also, it turned out, directed an episode of Doctor Who: Closing Time with James Corden and Matt Smith. Being a huge Doctor Who nerd, I was like, “You’re not the same Steve Hughes who…?” He said he was, and we soon became buddies.

He was out in LA maybe a year, year and a half later for a Doctor Who convention, so we became friends in real life, not just in cyberspace. When I moved to England to score Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation, Steve was one of the people I hung out with because I didn’t know a ton of people in England.

We stayed in touch over the years. It turned out Steve was the director of eight of the episodes of Creeped Out and when he said he was working on the show, I mentioned that there was a hole in my schedule and I would love to work with him. He went to the producers of the show and they agreed to bring me on.

It’s often who you know, not necessarily what you know…

I’m finding that more and more. As much as people love the work I did on Mission or different things, the way my career’s unfolded, I don’t know big directors like Ridley Scott, David Fincher, or Robert Zemeckis. It’s been a bit of a challenge to get on their radar.

But then once in a while, something does happen; talking to Dan Pemberton about how he met Ridley Scott, it came about because [Dan’s music] was temped into one of Ridley’s movies. He didn’t know Ridley! Once in a while, you get that lucky break.

That happened to me in America with a station called The Hallmark Channel. A production company that made TV movies used The Way of the Gun as a temp score. They looked at my resume on-line and said, “We think he might do our movies.” They called me and I did, and it led to 40 or so TV movies for them over the course of ten years.

Creeped Out is an anthology series, so it’s very different from episode to episode. Is there any sort of overarching guidelines that you have for music, or is it very much every episode has to be different?

The concept of the show is that, like a Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, every episode is different. I was encouraged to change it up from episode to episode insomuch as the music should fit the story rather than the music being a constant no matter what the story was.

I had done another show a few years ago called Femmes Fatales, with a similar concept: every episode was a different genre. One week it was a ladies’ prison movie, the next episode it would be a combination of Blade Runner and The Terminator, and then a 40s noir, then a bank heist… so I had some experience in doing that.

This show has a character called The Curious, who bookends each episode, sort of like Rod Serling did in The Twilight Zone or the Cryptkeeper in Tales From the Crypt. That character has a theme which is the main theme of the show. One Easter egg I did for every episode – when the McGuffin or the twist of the episode reveals itself, I would sneak that little theme in somewhere in the orchestration. Other than that it was a blank slate from episode to episode.

The factors that helped decide what kind of music would be in it were input from writers, directors, producers, but also the story and the setting of it.

We had one show that took place at a funfair at the beach with a puppet, so that had funfair sideshow music; another one involved a young girl and the ocean so that had a slightly more fantastical feel to it. We had one that was a time travel one where a kid meets his father as a kid. That had some winks and nods to Back to the Future. There was one with kids causing trouble in an apartment complex so we used more modern electronic music for that, and using that for that part meant the score for the whole episode had a more electronic sound design quality.

Were you using an orchestra or electronic?

Every attempt was made to make it sound authentic to what it needed to be for the show. Practicalities of schedule and budget meant quite a lot of it had to be realised in a creative way.

How far in advance were you composing this? Were you writing to finished picture or from scripts?

There was one episode about girl scouts; they’re in Northern England in the woods getting their bravery badges. They encounter a mysterious force and one by one they go crazy and start singing a nursery rhyme in their heads. I read the script of that in advance because at one point they were interested in having the nursery rhyme being an original composition that fit with the score. In the end they ended up going with ‘Ring Around the Rosie’ because of its instant recognisability, which was the right move. I read the script in advance for that, and for the Back to the Future-type story in advance.

There was some question of, “Is he sure he wants to do this kids’ show for CBBC? He’s the guy who did Mission: Impossible.” They sent me a script to make sure I wasn’t delusional. I was very happy and excited to work on it and the fact it was for kids was a big plus for me.

Generally for me, I prefer to work as close to [locked] picture as possible rather than to a script or a very early cut. With the script, the tone can change during shooting; the casting can alter how characters come across; and even in the edits, scenes can be cut or moved around in a way that changes your reaction to the story. If I start making story and character decisions in the score and then the show gets completely recut, it ends up being less productive than if I just saw the final production and scored that.

What’s your process?

On Creeped Out, the schedule was pretty breakneck. I do all the writing myself; I don’t have a team of writers that help me get through the episodes, it was just me by myself scoring every episode. I would spend half a day watching the half-hour show over and over again and then the second half of the day I would sit at the piano and develop themes in my notebook for the episode – I’d need a theme for the girl, I need a theme for the monster, or whatever the McGuffin of the show was.

The second day, first thing in the morning I’d sit down with scene 1 and then start scoring the show to picture. I’ve got my notebook with my themes but then I’m doing the orchestration, composition and mixing all simultaneously so I can get it done in a timely process.

I basically work on the cue till it’s where I want it, then I mix it down and move on. I don’t go back unless either inspiration strikes me to change something that I’ve already done, or I deliver everything and get feedback from the filmmakers.  Then I go back and do rewrites and deliver the finals.

How long did it take you to do that on an episode from sitting down for scene 1 to the finished version?

Depending on the episode, two to three days once I’d gotten the flow. Because I developed the thematic material ahead of time, I could get through scoring to picture pretty quick. A 22 minute episode might have, say, 15 minutes of score in it, so writing 5-7 minutes a day was not impossible. Then the rewrites would be another day a few days later. In the meantime I’d be starting the next episode.

We did all 13 as one big block – I did all my work between June and October 2017, except for some preliminary stuff I did during production. [And] we had spent from March to May developing the main title theme, which was also the theme for The Curious character.

Did they have any specific ideas of what they wanted?

They had pitched me the concept of the character and sent me a couple of shots from the dailies. It’s a very creepy character so I knew it had to be a suitably creepy theme for the character.

One of the writers suggested as a touchstone the idea of a hook like The Twilight Zone had – kids playing around will sing it; it’s become a general pop culture reference. [The show runners] said they’d love it if there was something that stuck in your head like that, and it became a signifier for the odd or the eerie.

I was looking for something that was fairly short but memorable. I didn’t want  a long-winded theme: I wanted a little motif that was recognizable and eerie and weird-sounding. I made three or four little 30-second demos and sent them to the crew and they all voted. The one that ended up the theme was the one that won the voting process – everybody thought this was the one.

The other three ended up appearing in some of the scores in a different function. It wasn’t that they were not effective pieces of music but this was the one that really grabbed everybody.

Click here for part 2 of this interview, in which Joe Kraemer talks about his work for Big Finish on Doctor Who.

Thanks to Beth Krakower for her help in arranging this interview