‘Hunger Games’ screenwriter Billy Ray wrote his personal YA novel

Billy Ray is terrified.

Or no less than that’s what the award-winning screenwriter says in response to the innocuous-to-the-point-of-pitiful interview-opener: “How are you doing?”

Strangely, he isn’t referring to the state of our nation (although he has been scathingly crucial of each the Trump administration and the Democratic Party) or the potential perils of synthetic intelligence (which he not too long ago described to The Times as “a cancer masquerading as a profit center”) and even the state of the field workplace in Hollywood’s new age of contraction (Ray famously wrote the now-iconic, pro-cinema Nicole-Kidman-in-a-sparkly-pantsuit ad for AMC.)

No, Ray is terrified as a result of his first novel, a YA dystopian tackle “Romeo and Juliet” referred to as “Burn the Water,” is about to come back out. And although he is aware of what it’s like when a movie underperforms, this feels very totally different.

“If you’re a screenwriter and you write a movie and for some reason people don’t come,” he stated amid the clatter and dialog in a West Hollywood espresso store, “you can hide behind the director, you can hide behind the cast, you can hide behind all kinds of things. But if you write a book and nobody buys it, there’s nobody to hide behind.”

In “Burn the Water,” Ray imagines London in 2425, roughly 300 years after the polar ice caps have collapsed, flooding a lot of the world in a cataclysmic occasion. In the turmoil that adopted “the Great Soak” of 2100, a organic weapon was set off in London, additional decimating its inhabitants by nerve fuel and creating two warrior homes referred to as the Rogues and the Crowns.

The Rogues and the Crowns went on to interact in three centuries of warfare over the half-submerged metropolis’s dwindling assets. (The unaffiliated lots, referred to as the Habs, do a lot of the labor.) Predictably, life expectancy shortened dramatically, so most of the warriors and their captains are youngsters and youngsters. Including Jule, ace fighter for the Crowns, and Rafe, her counterpart for the Rogues, who we meet within the guide’s opening pages and rapidly grow to be the star-crossed lovers of the story.

Propulsive and cinematic, “Burn the Water” cries out for a movie adaptation, which isn’t shocking since Ray is a screenwriter and the bones of the story started as a film. Fifteen years in the past, he stated, he heard that Greg Silverman, then head of Warner Bros., was on the lookout for a brand new spin on “Romeo and Juliet.” “So I assumed, ‘OK, what if I do “Romeo and Juliet” in the future; what would that look like?’”

As usually occurs in Hollywood, it turned out that this isn’t what Silverman had needed in any respect, however Ray had grow to be connected to his concept and so it sat on the again shelf of his thoughts, first as a characteristic, then as a sequence and, lastly, a novel.

When the Writers Guild of America went on strike two years in the past, he thought, “If I don’t write a novel now, I never will.”

So he did. While additionally internet hosting a Deadline-sponsored podcast referred to as “Strike Talk,” Ray spent the sixth months between when the WGA strike started (May 2, 2023) and the overlapping SAG-AFTRA strike ended (Nov. 9) studying how you can write a novel.

Which, because it seems, could be very totally different from adapting one.

“I was feeling such impostor syndrome,” he stated. “I knew I was a screenwriter but I didn’t think I was a novelist.”

He set it in London for causes topographical — ”I wanted a metropolis that was on an island so it could be fully reduce off” — and historic — ”in homage to Shakespeare.”

That homage didn’t lengthen to lengthy soliloquy; “Burn the Water” is deliberately economical. Indeed, Ray’s preliminary draft was “very lean — I was so afraid of boring people, of seeming pretentious.” When he confirmed it to readers he trusted, they instructed him, “‘This isn’t a novel, it’s a screenplay in prose.’ They said, ‘You have to understand that in a novel, you’re the camera, you’re the actors’ faces, you’re the production designer.’”

So he wrote one other draft that was 50% longer and extra descriptive. And whereas he hadn’t supposed to write down a YA novel, he realized that by making his characters a number of years youthful than he had initially conceived them, he may attain a youthful viewers.

“I ultimately wanted it to be a gift to young people, young women specifically, about leadership,” he stated. “I’ve spent so much time in the political space and a lot of what we talk about is young people feeling so disenfranchised and so disempowered; they don’t know what to do. And I want them to know they have the option of leading.”

By “political space,” Ray is referring to the truth that for nearly 10 years, he has served as one thing of a communications consultant for the Democrat Party. “When Trump was elected the first time, I knew I had to do something beyond writing checks,” he stated. That one thing consists of writing, or serving to to write down, speeches and marketing campaign advertisements and extra usually advising elected officers and candidates about “how to sound less like a Democrat” to be able to attraction to voters within the middle. He is presently working with 80 sitting members of the House and Senate and one other 60 candidates.

“Americans are not actually divided,” he has stated earlier than and repeats now. “A majority agree with the Democratic position on abortion rights, minimum wage, healthcare, cost of living and climate change.”

But the social gathering, he stated, has grow to be so afraid of offending somebody that it spends extra time arguing over pronoun use than it does over the truth that “in 1960, the average age of a first-time homeowner was 23; now it’s 40. Talk about that. Stop excluding people from the party. Wanting secure borders does not make you a racist. Owning a gun does not make you a school shooter. Being unsure about vaccines doesn’t make you a flat-Earther.”

What Ray perceives as unexamined pondering and entrenched prejudice is, together with a transparent warning about local weather change, very current in “Burn the Water.” Still raging 300 years after the occasion that originally provoked it, the struggle between the Crowns and the Rogues is actually meaningless; it has grow to be a self-sustaining cycle of violence based mostly nearly fully on clan id. Having been raised to hate the opposing aspect just because they are the opposing aspect, Rafe and Jule initially can not consider that their love is feasible, a lot much less sustainable.

“It is a political book,” Ray stated, however he was striving for an equal stability of affection, violence and politics. “When people read it, I would ask three questions: ‘Were you ever bored? Were you ever confused? Do you think [those things] are balanced?’”

Beyond “The Hunger Games,” and the upcoming prequel “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” Ray has not learn a lot YA fiction. When he was requested to adapt “The Hunger Games,” he didn’t know what it was. “I asked my kids — my daughter was 14, my son was 9 — and they looked at me as if I had stepped off the Mayflower.”

Unlike most first-time YA novelists, nonetheless, he was in a position to “send an early draft to Suzanne [Collins, author of ‘The Hunger Game’ series] and she was hugely helpful.”

“Romeo and Juliet” is, in some ways, a YA play, and love that should overcome socially inflicted obstacles (together with of the interspecies selection) fuels a lot of the style, as do worlds ravaged and divided by futuristic visions of present realities taken to their extremes. Ray says he selected apocalypse by water as a result of it’s the most certainly results of an unchecked local weather disaster, however the actual villain of the piece is tribalism — the Rogues and the Crowns would reasonably make a foul state of affairs worse by killing one another than unify in an try to resolve bigger issues.

Even along with his ironclad writing credentials, which incorporates an Oscar nomination for “Captain Phillips,” he appears genuinely stunned that he landed a profitable two-book cope with Scholastic; he’s already written the second in what he hopes will probably be a trilogy.

“We’ll have to see how this one does.”

If it does nicely, he want to see a trilogy of movies as nicely.

Not TV?

“Maybe,” he stated. “But I want to do whatever I can to help movies.”

After all, as a extra trendy grasp than Shakespeare as soon as wrote: “Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”