Toronto film composer Andrew Lockington has captured the attention of Hollywood and is riding a career high, working on successive major U.S. studio releases, including the upcoming fantasy City of Ember, produced by Tom Hanks and directed by Gil Kenan (Monster House), and the current Montreal-shot New Line Cinema release Journey to the Centre of the Earth, directed by visual effects wizard Eric Brevig.

But the 34-year-old has no plans to move south and focus his efforts entirely on blockbusters. Instead he continues to live in Toronto and works both sides of the border, scoring the music on both Canadian and Hollywood features. One of his latest projects, Toronto filmmaker Michael McGowan’s One Week, starring Joshua Jackson (Dawson’s Creek) and Liane Balaban (Definitely, Maybe), will premiere this fall at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Playback spoke with Lockington about creating the music for One Week, his work on City of Ember, and the differences in working on Canadian and Hollywood films.

Tell me about the process of working with Michael McGowan on One Week.
I worked with Michael previously on his film Saint Ralph and a CBC pilot, Left Coast. We became friends and he started talking to me about music for One Week from the time the film was a conceptual idea. He would send me versions of the script as he worked on them, so we were thinking about the type of music that would fit with the film from the beginning.

As a result, the music became part of the building blocks of the movie. I wrote musical sketches before they even shot anything. Then, in the edit suite, we played music against picture to figure out what worked, and sometimes the music influenced how they edited certain scenes.

The end result is you have a movie where the score is very much a part of the fabric of the film, as opposed to a layer added after all of the other creative has been done. This was definitely a unique situation.

So this is rare – typically composers are called in much later?
Very rare. In an ideal world, you are called in while a film is shooting, but on most Hollywood films they don’t think about the composer until well after the movie is shot – usually during the editing process. For example, on City of Ember, I was brought in during post.

One Week is a road movie about a guy named Ben who takes a motorcycle trip across Canada on a quest to find meaning in his life. What kind of music did you create to help illustrate the film’s themes?
I had this idea from the beginning that the music should sound like a bunch of people sitting around a campfire, or in the back of a Volkswagen Bug with an acoustic guitar. So I was looking for a simple group of musical themes that were hummable, that people would get in their heads – high-quality but not over-produced sound. So I wrote two songs that had no lyrics and I extrapolated the score from those songs. They are melodic little motifs of unplugged acoustic Canadiana. You never hear the songs in their entirety, but you get this recurring melodic element that weaves in and out of the movie. It is like this music is inside Ben’s head.

There is also a lot of source music in the movie – songs from different Canadian bands – and this is playing out the physical road trip. In a film, the music that people respond most to is music they have heard before and have a relationship with. Score doesn’t have that, so you have to build a relationship between the song and your audience. Because the melodic themes are recurring in the movie, it helps do that.

The third musical theme in the movie is very ethereal analog sounds, and the melody is played by a Celtic Uilleann pipe – like a Scottish bagpipe, but you pump it using your under arm. We are deep inside Ben’s head at these moments.

Tell me about your current project, City of Ember.
It is based on the book [by Jeanne DuPrau] about the end of the world and a group of scientists who build a city underground to try to save the human race.

I have to do 85 minutes of score, and I got hired three weeks ago, and we record in a week. I am doing an orchestral score. We have hired the Bach Choir out of London. I have also used a lot of instruments recorded through old analog filters for some really interesting sound design, and melodies that are very ethereal and play with the orchestra.

What is the major difference between scoring a Hollywood studio picture and a Canadian movie?
The biggest difference is budget. On Hollywood movies it is very grand. But interestingly, the limitations of lower-budgeted films force you to come up with solutions you might not otherwise have thought of.

The challenge of a big movie is finding that same creativity. On City of Ember, we have a big orchestral budget, we have a big choir, we are recording the London Symphony. So even though you have no limitations, the very fact of doing this big orchestral score narrows it down to a specific genre of music. So you have to make a conscious effort to think outside the box and come up with something unique.

Do you have to deal with a lot more executives on a Hollywood movie?
The process is the same, in that you still work one-on-one with the director. But there is more money at stake, so there are proportionately more people to get things approved by. So instead of three people in the meetings, there are 10 people. Fortunately – knock on wood – they usually approve of what we are doing.

Do you plan to continue to work on both Canadian and U.S. films?
I had as much fun doing One Week as I did on the big Hollywood films. I want to do projects that are enjoyable to work on and allow me to be creative. And most importantly, I want to continue to work with the directors I have established relationships with. When you do a second or third film for a director, it’s like shorthand. They understand your capabilities and you understand how they like to weave music into their films. You aren’t starting for scratch.