MRH: For you, what was probably the hardest or the toughest scene to tackle, in terms of writing a cue that met its dramatic demands?

AL: Actually, all the scenes came pretty quickly. I wrote all the scenes in the course of two or three days, and one of the three scenes I went back to the drawing board because as I got further on in the film, I realized it wasn’t able to evolve the way I wanted it to, and that was actually Lina’s theme.

Also, around the middle of the film there are a lot of sequences where there’s a lot of tension; [the characters] are in the tunnels, and they’re trying to see what will happen and could happen at any moment. I was actually writing for one scene when Luther, one of the bad characters in the film, jumps in and scares everybody in the theatre to death, but as I was writing, I forgot where it was that Luther jumps in.

I was playing the City of Ember theme in a certain mode that I often did, and I had played it a few times in different ways. I think I was on my fourth time of playing it very slowly, and I was halfway through the phrase when he jumps into the scene. It completely shocked me and interrupted the phrase that I was writing, but I realized that the audience, like myself, would subconsciously hear me mid-phrase, and never expect something musically to happen there. I guess by accident, it introduced me to the idea of getting your audience familiar with the phrase, and then completely interrupting it.

MRH: Is there going to be a soundtrack album, because as I understand Journey in North America was available as an MP3 album, but in Europe it was available on CD?

AL: Yes. Part of the reason Journey was only available as an MP3 album is they had talked about releasing it as an extra with the DVD, but [later on] they didn’t see the value in releasing it as an extra if it had already come out in stores, so unfortunately that didn’t happen.

City of Ember is being released both digitally, and it comes out November 4th on hardcopy on Bulletproof Records, which is distributed by Universal, and should be everywhere.