Billy Ray on The Hunger Games, Captain Phillips, Hollywood & What It Takes to Create Great Films

On this episode we have an incredibly distinguished guest! We have the legendary Oscar nominated screenwriter: Billy Ray!

Billy is the mastermind behind Captain Phillips, The Hunger Games and the iconic Nicole Kidman AMC commercial!

Billy’s latest incredible new project, “BURN THE WATER”, marks his debut novel!

Written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, it’s a bold, emotionally charged reimagining of Romeo and Juliet set in a drowned, climate-ravaged London. It’s part epic love story, part warning and entirely human!

For decades Billy has built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most respected storytellers, crafting unforgettable films filled with tension, heart and huge cultural impact. Now, for the very first time, he’s stepping away from adapting stories for the screen and creating an entirely original world of his own!

In this interview Billy opens up about the transition from screenwriting to novel writing, what inspired him to tell this story, why Burn the Water felt so important to write, and how the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike gave him the opportunity to explore a completely different creative path!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Hi everyone. Thanks for tuning this episode of Nick Eagan Times. On this episode, we have an amazing guest. We have the legendary Oscar nominated screenwriter Billy Ray. Billy is the mind behind Captain Phillips, The Hunger Games, and the iconic Nicole Kidman AMC commercial. Billy's latest incredible new project, Burn the Water, Marty's debut novel, written during the 2023 SAG AF JAR Strike. It's a bold, emotionally charged re-imaging of Romeo and Juliet set in a drowned climate ravaged London. It's a part epic love story, part warning, warning, sorry, and entirely human. Welcome to the very talented Billy Rainer. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. You're very welcome. All right, let's jump straight into it. Firstly, take us back. Tell us about your life growing up, um, your family, and everything relating to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

I was raised here in Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. Um lived with my mother and my sister. Uh, saw my father on weekends, um, spent a lot of time thinking about sports and movies and television, and always wanted to be a storyteller. Um, first thing I ever sold uh was when I was 19. I sold an episode of the Jetsons, um, and then started chasing writing um professionally. Uh, I graduated from UCLA, uh, was working for two TV movie producers for a bunch of years and writing at night. I couldn't sell anything, tried two novels, couldn't sell either of them. Um, and then uh sold my first script and have been making a living as a professional writer um ever since, and have seen my career sort of do that um until it hit a place where it started to do that. And um very, very grateful that I got uh that opportunity. Um this burn the water was an idea that I had, uh I guess 18 years ago. Um, but it was such a huge idea. It involved such world creation and water. Um, it was just going to be a prohibitively expensive movie. Um and no one was gonna do that unless there was IP. So it was something I never wrote, uh, IP meaning intellectual property. And so it was something I never wrote uh as a screenplay or as a TV series. And then when my beloved guild, the Writers' Guild, went on strike in 2023, I couldn't write a movie or a TV show because we were pencils down. And I thought, well, if I don't write a novel now, I never will. So I tried it as a novel. I began it on day one of the Writers' Guild strike and finished it on the last day of the SAG after strike.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Incredible. Can you elaborate uh about the Burn the Water, the novel? Um tell me what it's about, and yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Sure. Um, it's 400 years in the future, the year is 24, 25, and we are in London. Um, England is 90% underwater. Both the polar caps have melted. The world has plunged into war. Um, London has no power, no comms, no connection to the rest of the world. Uh, no one in London knows if there is a rest of the world. They don't know if anyone's alive in America or Russia or Africa or anywhere else. Um the 10% of land in London that is still livable, that is still above water, it's called the Dry Ten. And it is being warred over by two rival houses, two gangs, the rogues and the crowns. Uh Rafe is an 18-year-old. He is the most fearsome soldier in the rogues, and Jewel is also 18. She's the most fearsome soldier in the crowns, and they fall in love.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

It's amazing. Um, this happened the creation of it in the SAG After Um Strike during that period. What was the inspiration specifically for it? And the idea, I guess, behind it.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Well, as I said, I couldn't write anything else. And this idea had been living in me by that point for 15 years. And it was time to just sit down and see if the idea worked. And I I literally sat down on day one and and wrote the first uh page and decided, okay, all right, I guess I can write in prose as well as uh screenplay format and just kept going. Um and I just I just kept going. Um and as I said, it was 133 days later I wrote the very last scene.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

That's incredible. Uh tell me, what would you like your legacy to be when you look back? You've done obviously truly inspiring stuff. Um, what would you like your legacy to be?

SPEAKER_00 4:30

Well, I mean, I don't want to sound grandiose, but you'd like to be at a place where if there was a Mount Rushmore of writers, that you're on it. Um you want to leave behind a legacy of great work, whether it's um features or TV or novels or theater, or hopefully all of them. Um, so that um people, your kids will be able to look back later in your career and say, wow, dad was one of the best. Um that's what I'm always shooting for.

SPEAKER_01 5:00

Incredible. And um, what's the best compliment you've ever received?

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Oh boy. Um I guess the best compliment I ever received was I had just made a movie uh called uh Shattered Glass, um, which was about uh this this guy named Stephen Glass who was working in the the Washington journalism world. And when um when Bob Woodward saw the movie and said, You got it right, um, that was probably the most meaningful conflict I ever got.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Awesome. What's the um best piece of advice you've ever saved?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Uh the great screenwriter Patty Chaevsky, uh, who won three Oscars for uh Marty Network and the hospital, he in an interview once said about writing, don't think of it as art, think of it as work. Because if a writer is stuck and he or she calls in a second writer for help, that second writer doesn't say what's the art problem. They say what's not working, and they get under the hood and they fix it. You know, 95% of writing is just problem solving. You have to think of yourself as a mechanic. You're just trying to make an engine run right. And if if you can do that, you take a lot of pressure off yourself. You take all the mythology out of writing, and it just becomes a job. I I get up every morning and do my job. I try to make engines run better. That's all I do.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Great. What would be the best piece of advice you give to a young, um, I guess aspiring Billy Ray?

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Um don't let anyone outwork you. Never let anyone out hustle you. Um, never slide for a second. Approach every meeting like it's an audition. Um, I, you know, I've been doing this quite a while now, and I still approach every meeting, whether it's someone I've known for 30 years or not, as if it's the first time they're meeting me. Literally, I get in that mindset and it's a chance to make a first impression on them. And that first impression is going to be you're never going to meet anyone who's going to work harder, um, be more collegial, be more professional, be more open to notes than I am. And um, if you approach it in that way with that level of um rigor and humility, um, where you're just letting your work be the thing that people know about you. Um, don't keep hiring.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Tremendous. That's really inspiring advice to thanks for sharing. Um, all right, you worked on the incredible um Captain Phillips and the Hunger Games. Tell me about both uh individually those experiences and what they were like.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Sure. Um, Captain Phillips was still on the destroyer that had saved his life when Sony announced that they were going to uh acquire his life rights. Um at that point in my career, generally when people offered me movies, they offered them to me exclusively, meaning I didn't have to compete with other writers. I would get them, I would get the material for a week or a weekend and be able to decide whether or not I wanted to go in on it. Um, but that was not Captain Phillips. Captain Phillips was going to be a beauty pageant. Every writer in town was going to be able to come in and pitch. And I thought, okay, is it worth it to go in and compete with every writer in Hollywood to get that movie? Um, because there's a risk. Uh, if you at the level that I was at, if you go in and compete and don't get it, you know, you hurt your brand. But it was a very, very special story because it it was one of those rare, and by that I mean singular true stories that laid out like an action movie. It's it's beats or action movie beats. You didn't have to invent anything. So it was something I decided was worth the risk. So then I thought, okay, what's what's my pitch going to be? What is it that I'm going in and selling? You know, if you look at just the narrative of what that movie is, um, in that movie, a white guy gets kidnapped by four black guys and three of them get their heads blown off. And not only is that not a movie I want to write, that is not even a movie I want to see. So I started to think, okay, how can I twist that a little bit? How can I just adjust it a little bit so that I'm not making anything up, but I'm telling it from a point of view that sounds interesting to me thematically. And so when I went in to pitch on that movie, it was the shortest pitch I've ever done in my career. It was only a minute. Um, and I've I've pitched for an hour before, which I don't advocate, but I've done it. When I had to, I've done it. But that pitch was this is a movie about leadership. It's about two captains who wake up on opposite sides of the globe and they get dressed and they go to work. And their job is to put them on a collision course. And once they meet, we will find out that one of these captains, in order to save his men, would sacrifice himself. And the other captain, in order to save himself, would sacrifice his men. And that's the movie. Um, Hunger Games, completely different experience. One day I got a call, sitting in my office, and I got a call saying, Do you want to adapt the Hunger Games? And I walked into my house. My kids at that point, at that point, were 14 and 9, and I said, What's the Hunger Games? And they looked at me like, Oh, dad, you're just lost. Um, and then I sat down and read the book overnight. And I said, Oh, this is the greatest idea I've ever heard. Literally, the greatest idea for a movie I've ever heard, the darkest idea I've ever heard. And something happened to me when I was putting that together. I began to think of it as a true story. I don't know why. Something in my brain just switched and it became a true story. And I became so outraged that there was a government that would do this to children. And I wrote it from that place of outrage. And I I think that wound up on the screen.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Significant, significant, wow. What's the process when you hit a curative war?

SPEAKER_00 10:46

There's no such thing.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:48

I just don't believe in that. I don't think writer's block is an actual thing. Just keep your fingers moving, type something. Um, you can always make it better. It doesn't have to be perfect. That's again the idea of just don't think of it as art, think of it as work. Don't wait around to be brilliant and don't uh restrict yourself from writing if you don't have something brilliant to say. Just work, make it better later.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

And would you say that success um versus timing versus talent? Do you think that has anything to play into it as well?

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Um, I think 95% of it is just work. Um, and yeah, there's a certain percentage in there that has to do with, you know, God-given ability. Um, but I think that part's really overrated. And I've I've, you know, I've been at this, as I said, quite a while. And and um in that time, I've seen a lot of writers get pistols and sell a bunch of stuff or sell a bunch of pitches, pitches and and then vanish um because they don't do the work. Um and they coast. And and so, you know, I'd much rather have effort than talent.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

Well, looking back at your distinguished career, um, what's been the most challenging part and how did you overcome it?

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Well, I don't know that I have overcome it yet. Um, what has been the most challenging part? The most challenging part to me has been that there are certain stories, certain projects that just seem obvious to me, that don't seem nakedly commercial to studios, and so they will bulk. Um, that's been the most challenging part. And I I definitely, I definitely have not solved it. Um, there have been moments where I've been more successful than others in terms of convincing someone that they should take a chance on something. Um, but for the most part, there's a sort of pathological timidity in my business um that I do not see getting better.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Thanks for sharing that. Um, what excites you most about this industry?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

The same thing that always excited me about it. Um, you know, go see Hamnet, right? Just go see something done really well. Um, go see sinners, um, where you just see this explosion of creativity all over the screen and all of these crafts people conspiring to tell a story really boldly and really well. Um, you know, we're still capable of that, just like we were capable of it when I was a kid. Um, there will always be people who who want to execute their vision at the highest possible level, um, who want to put in that level of uh sweat equity, and they will continue to tell great stories. And that's incredibly encouraging to me.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

What was your biggest break and how do you think that matured you?

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Um, I don't think it's our breaks that mature us, I think it's our failures that mature us. Um I've had breaks every single day of um of my career. Um, you know, I was I was born um at the right time with parents who could educate me. Um in a country um that didn't draft me into war. I was lucky enough to be able to go to college um and do internships over the summer so I could keep learning. Um I had my health uh in every way that I could have gotten a break. I got a break. And um, you know, my father was a brilliant literary agent, represented some of the greatest screenwriters in the business. So I was around it and I I learned it um by watching some of the best. Um yeah, I've had incredible opportunities. Um, but those are not the things that matured me. What matured me was getting punched in the face and the the sting of that. That's that's what makes you ask the hard questions and and grow and learn.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

When when do you know when to finish a story, when to end the story?

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Um Well, every story has these two things that are happening simultaneously. Your protagonist has two problems. We'll just say he for brevity's sake, but he has an external problem, something outside himself that he's got to deal with. He's got to catch a shark or stop a killer or put out a fire, something that he's focused on. And he's got an internal story, something broken about him internally that only your movie can fix. If you arc it properly, he's so busy focusing on that external problem, he's unaware that he's changing internally by focusing on that external problem. And I as I said, if you've if you've architected it right, as he's dealing with and solving that external problem, he is coming to grips with that internal brokenness about himself. And they both happen at the exact same time, and that's when the movie's over.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

That's really remarkable insights. Thanks for sharing. Um, what's it like working behind the scenes um in Hollywood? For people that wouldn't know too much about like what it is behind the scenes working behind it. What is it actually like?

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Like I said, it's a job. I I get up in the morning and I'm at my desk at eight, and um I write, and um I take a break around one and I feed myself and I'm back at 1.15 and basically go till six. Um, and that's all I do. Um, it's just not terribly glamorous. It's it's exciting, it's it's inspiring, it's challenging, it's never boring for a second because it's so hard. Um but it's not glamour, it's not like I'm going out clubbing with movie stars or something. Um, it's nothing like that. It's just um taking ideas, getting them on paper, trying to make them better, sending them around to friends to see what they think, then rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. I mean, I don't know, Captain Phillips was 15 drafts. Um, that's that's what working behind the camera is.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Okay. What still challenges you creatively today?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Everything. Everything. There's never been an easy day writing in my career. Um, every single day of Burn the Water was a challenge. Um, every single day rewriting Burn the Water was a challenge. Um now I'm out there trying to promote it. Um, that brings its own challenges. I've already written the sequel, that was hard as hell. Um, and I've written several drafts of that um uh in tandem with a brilliant editor at Scholastic named Lisa Sandel. Um, yeah, it's all hard. It's supposed to be. If it were easy, it wouldn't be gratifying when you did it well.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Sure. What motivates you daily?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Fear of failure, um, desire to excel, all the stuff that would motivate an athlete.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Where's your favorite place to travel to?

SPEAKER_00 17:31

New York. It's really inspiring there.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah. All right. If you are eating against Sorry, say it again.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

I've never been to Australia, so we don't know.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Well, you gotta come down here, you're always welcome.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

We'll catch up. And what's your favorite food to eat? There was a favorite meal. What would you eat?

SPEAKER_00 17:48

Well, okay. If I were on Death Row, um it would be definitely a bacon and cheese hamburger, and then French fries, obviously. Uh ketchup, of course, yeah, and uh a Coke on ice, chipped ice. And then I think dessert would probably be um, I'd like to try a really rich chocolate brownie, also wrapped in bacon. I don't know if those exist, but that's what I would ask for.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Tremendous. And with everything you've ever done in your career, it can be personally, actually, it can be personally or professionally, what's been your proudest moment?

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Being a parent, for sure. Um being a father is the most meaningful thing I've ever done. And I can't imagine anything would ever come close. Um professionally, I've I've had my name on movies that I I really am proud of. But um, right now I have to say uh Burn the Water is the one that I'm most focused on and most proud of, because it was the only novel uh that I've ever had published, and and I did it relatively late in my career um when I don't know too many other screenwriters that are out there doing what I just did. So I I feel really good about that.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

If you write in again, you could change anything. It can be personally again or professionally, what would you change?

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Uh well, I think I would go back to the 80s and I would uh write Jurassic Park. That's what I would do. If I could redo my career, uh yeah, I think I would go steal that idea from Michael Crichton and uh and then the screenplay from David Kepp and the movie from Steven Spielberg. I think I'd go back and say, hey board, look what I just thought up. And I think everything after that would have been a lot easier.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

What is your favorite film of all time?

SPEAKER_00 19:37

My favorite film of all time is the greatest movie of all time. Uh that's The Godfather. There's nothing close.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Right. Billy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I do appreciate it. Thank you for sharing everything. Um, it's truly remarkable everything you've done in your career. I wish you nothing but the best for your new novel. And yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

Thank you. Um I hope I hope you read Burn the Water. I hope you love it, and I hope your fans do too. I definitely will, my friend. Thank you, sir.