Billy Ray (screenwriter)


Billy Ray is an American screenwriter and film director. He began writing for television and movies in 1994 with Color of Night. He has written numerous successful films, including the first Hunger Games movie, Captain Phillips, and Richard Jewell, earning an Oscar nomination for the second film.

Biography

Ray was born in Los Angeles, and raised in Encino, Los Angeles, California. He is from a Jewish family, and attended Steven Wise Temple and Birmingham High School. Starting in 2003, he began to direct as well as write; his first film was Shattered Glass, inspired by the true story of Stephen Glass, a journalist who fabricated a majority of his stories. He was nominated for Most Promising Filmmaker by the Chicago Film Critics Association and an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for his work on this film. Breach, which Ray co-wrote and directed, tells a similar story about Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and later, Russia, for more than two decades, and Eric O'Neill, who worked as his assistant and helped bring about his downfall.
He is perhaps best known for writing the screenplay to the 2012 blockbuster, The Hunger Games, and his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the 2013 film, Captain Phillips. Ray also worked with the advertising agency Barkley to help write the AMC Theatres 2021 "We Make Movies Better" campaign starring Nicole Kidman.

Filmography

Films
YearTitleDirectorWriterProducer
1994Color of Night
1995The Shooter
1997Volcano
1998Legalese
2002Hart's War
2003Shattered Glass
2004Suspect Zero
2005Flightplan
2007Breach
2009State of Play
2012The Hunger Games
2013Captain Phillips
2015The Breakup Girl
2015Secret in Their Eyes
2018Overlord
2019Gemini Man
2019Terminator: Dark Fate
2019Richard Jewell
2026The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping
2026Animals

Television
YearTitleDirectorWriterExecutive
Producer		Notes
1994–1995Earth 2Co-creator
2016–2017The Last TycoonAlso developer
2020The Comey RuleMiniseries