Guest post written by Burn The Water author Billy Ray
Billy Ray is one of modern Hollywood’s preeminent screenwriters and the author of Burn the Water. He wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Captain Phillips, for which he won the Writers Guild of America Award. Ray’s films as writer, co-writer, or writer-director include The Hunger Games, Richard Jewell, Shattered Glass, Showtime’s The Comey Rule, and the forthcoming Sunrise on the Reaping. Billy lives in Los Angeles. He believes in democracy, justice, his children, and the Dodgers.
About Burn The Water: From award-winning screenwriter of The Hunger Games Billy Ray comes an immersive and breathtaking enemies-to-lovers epic romance about war, loyalty, and the power that love has to save… or destroy. Out March 3rd 2026.
Burn The Water began as a love letter from me to William Shakespeare.
I wanted to write a new version of Romeo and Juliet—to set it in the future. I’d been thinking—as all parents do—about what that future might look like, what the world might look like years from now, and what truths it might reveal to us today.
Step One: where to place such a story? London. Yes, London. The Bard’s home canvas. A city on an island drenched in history yet utterly unprepared for a vicious future. Two rival Houses, the Rogues and the Crowns, fighting for the few patches of land that would still be livable in that city. And two young rival soldiers, Rafe and Jule, who fall in love despite being enemies. War and passion and treachery and fear and courage and battles—lots of battles—to tell us who those two lovers actually are when under the unbearable pressure of being told they must kill one another.
Oh, and a roadmap for how a young girl turns into a warrior queen—how much pain that would require, how much sacrifice and unspeakable loss. And how much HOPE.
I thought about it as a feature film. Then I thought about it as a TV series. But producers kept telling me it would be too big, too expensive. London 90% underwater! Years passed as I continued my work as a screenwriter and director, a journey that took me from Somali pirates to Hunger Games to a Nicole Kidman AMC ad celebrating America’s return to the movies.
And then I realized: “BURN THE WATER IS A NOVEL!”
So, I sat down, apologized to the ghosts of Nabokov, Hugo, and Fitzgerald for my hubris… and began to write this story in prose, a personal dues-paying process of learning the massive gap between how screenplays are read and how novels are read. With the firm, steady, and patient hands of a number of close friends, and a brilliant editor from Scholastic, Burn The Water actually began to feel like a book.
Now that it’s about to be published, I can see that somewhere along the way, this book stopped being a love letter to Shakespeare and became instead a missive from me to all the teens in our turbulent world—to give them courage and faith and heroes to root for.
In the end, we must either turn to one another or on one another. I think love is the right thing to do, especially when all seems lost.
That was true in 1600, it’s true now, and it will be true in the time of Rafe and Jule.
