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If you have seen recent films such as “Finding Ohana,” “Mortal Kombat,” “Red Notice,” “No One Will Save You,” “It, Chapter Two,” or “Hellboy,” or series such as “Tiny World,” “Berlin Station,” or “Snatch,” you have heard soundtrack music composed by Hollister resident Jared Michael Fry.
His most recent film soundtrack, Miramax’s “The Beekeeper,” starring Jason Statham, was co-composed with David Sardy and is 2024’s highest-grossing movie to date, taking in $75 million in its first 10 days of release. It is currently playing at Hollister’s Premiere Cinemas.
“To me, music is the heart of any film,” Fry said. “You want to challenge the audience to think beyond what they see. You want to capture the emotions and the thoughts behind a scene, the depth and the meaning behind it, the purpose and what drives the characters.”
Fry began studying music at the age of seven when his father decided that he and his brother Josh should learn to play the piano.
“He didn’t know how to play piano,” he said, “but it was something he wanted for us and he forced us to play, kicking and screaming. But we got kicked out of a few piano classes because my brother and I were too rowdy.”
In the fifth grade, Fry switched to the trumpet and stayed with it until he moved to Hollister around the time he was in the seventh grade.
“The band teacher said he had too many trumpet players, but we need a tuba player,” Fry said. “So for the next few years, I played tuba in the marching band, the concert band and the jazz band.”
By the time Fry reached high school, he had blue hair and was playing trumpet in a “quirky, wacky” ska band called “Fat Loser Boy,” later moving on to a hardcore band called “Novice,” now with black hair and playing guitar. He stayed with that band for about five years until he got married and started considering a new career, first considering dentistry before deciding on music.
Fry attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, first studying songwriting before his interest in film scoring was piqued by Michael Giacchino’s soundtrack for Pixar’s “Up.”
“It changed my perspective of film music,” he said. “I always thought of it as orchestral, very classical stuff. But “Up” was very modern and showed me that film music could be anything that you wanted.”
After graduating from Berklee, he moved to Los Angeles, hoping to work at a movie studio. He scored an internship audition at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Studios while working in a movie theater.
“I spent the night at the studio with the engineers mixing films,” he said. “And you’re able to sit behind composers and watch them work. I was developing relationships and trying to be in the right place, right time.”
The position at Remote Control led to a job at Bleeding Fingers Music, another Zimmer venture that produces scores and custom musical libraries for films and television shows. From there, he got his first real break, working on the Planet Earth series with Jacob Shea.
“Other composers would ask Jacob to write things for them,” he said. “It got to the point where Jacob was so busy, he trusted me to do the writing under him.”
Citing Dario Marianelli’s score for “Anna Karenina,” Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Marnie,” Michael Kamen’s score for “Robin Hood,” and John Williams’ score for “Home Alone” as being among his favorites, Fry describes himself as an “action music guy,” carving out his place in the genre starting with composing for “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.”
Fry begins his process for writing a score with repeat viewings of a scene he is working on, breaking it down moment to moment, then layering in the music.
“The first thing I will do is go through the scene and put in markers,” he said. “I’ll put them in scene cuts or where there is a device, like when people’s eyes suddenly move. Something that is a very storytelling moment, moving the story forward.”
His most recent film, “The Beekeeper,” fits his musical style perfectly—The Internet Movie Database describes the film as “one man’s brutal campaign for vengeance takes on national stakes after he is revealed to be a former operative of a powerful and clandestine organization.”
He was brought in at the last hour to supplement work that composer David Sarti had already framed out. He said that he was able to bring a sense of cinematic largeness to the film’s visceral action scenes, which he described as a “mainstream popcorn movie attitude.”
Fry said that using words like “emotionally,” “energetically,” “cinematically”— the adjectives of storytelling—works a lot better in describing his job than talking about the music itself.
“The thing about film music,” he said, “is that it’s not so much music for music’s sake. It’s applied art. It’s really just finding out what the scene or movie needs and providing that with the music.”
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