A can-do attitude

BILLY RAY doesn’t ever go to the Ivy. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Stacy Sherman. His second turn as director, “Breach,” is the story of the takedown of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who sold secrets to the Soviets for more than 20 years. It opened in theaters Friday. His writing credits include “Flightplan” and “Volcano.”

The FBI was of some assistance to you in your research on Robert Hanssen -- even passing along questions (that went unanswered) to him in prison. Were there ways in which they were unhelpful?

Let me put it this way: There were certain pieces of information to which they would not give me access. Being a writer and director does not entitle you to security status in our nation. It gets you a decent table in a restaurant.

Norman Mailer wrote a version of the Hanssen story for a TV movie in 2002. Have you seen it?

I did. I met him and spoke to him about it. He was speaking at a fund-raiser for the Los Angeles Public Library. When he got done speaking I went up to him and said, “You and I share a character.” And he said, “Who’s that?” I told him, and he said, “I’d love to know how you did it because I didn’t get him right.”

You’re brought in a lot to rewrite. What’s it like being a rewrite man?

By the time they bring you in as a rewriter, everyone around you is in a state of complete panic. Because they’ve done draft after draft and they’ve spent a ton of money and they just want someone to come in and say, “Don’t worry, it’s all going to be OK and there’s a way to fix this.” So you get to come in and be a hero. And that’s a great feeling. When you’re the first writer on the movie it’s like sticking your head in the mouth of a cannon.

You have a love of nonfiction accounts -- but you don’t work in actual documentary.

My wife made a documentary last year that was nominated for an Academy Award, called “God Sleeps in Rwanda.” She should have won, by the way. That was a complete robbery.

So there’s lots of documentary pillow talk? What’s on your nightstand?

Well, there’s lots of screenwriting talk. I’m reading “The Great Bridge” by David McCullough, which is about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. She’s trying to convince me I should make it into a movie, and I’m trying to tell her it’s impossible and really expensive.

Are these sorts of nonfiction movies a hard pitch?

Any time you do a grown-up movie in Hollywood, the bar is just set higher. You have to demonstrate what elements in that movie will lend themselves to a good-looking trailer. And conversely, you have to demonstrate how you’re going to go out and shoot those elements at a price. That was not a problem for me. The only movie I had directed before was “Shattered Glass,” which cost $5.8 million. But I didn’t need to go out and spend a kajillion dollars on my second feature. I think in Hollywood today -- and this is probably due to the power of the agencies, the big ones -- directors have a tendency to chart their success by the size of their budgets. I think that’s an extremely dopey way to gauge how your career is going.

What is “The People’s House”?

“The People’s House” is the best idea for a movie I’ve ever heard. It happens to be my wife’s idea -- she wrote the first draft. It’s a movie I’m hoping to produce with Imagine at Warner Bros. The president and the first lady are undergoing marital troubles and she wants the house. When my wife first told me that idea we were driving down Sunset Boulevard and I almost drove into a telephone pole.

If you think of yourself as a writer, then why are you directing?

I’m directing because when I was on the set of “Hart’s War,” and it was about 2 degrees and I was in Prague and everyone was freezing and [director] Greg Hoblit was standing there working his tail off, I could go home and relax. I didn’t have to be there for 12 hours. I could fly home! Something about that felt wrong to me.

There’s certain movies I’m capable of writing that I would have no idea how to direct. “Flightplan”? I was very happy writing that movie but wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to direct it. “Breach” was one of those movies that I felt I could manage. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m biased against the “a film by” credit. Isn’t “Breach” a film by my editor and composer and my producers? And a film by Chris Cooper too? For me to take “a film by” credit it seems a little greedy -- but that is very much a writer’s point of view.