Billy Ray’s first film for directing, “Shattered Glass,” is one that Hayden Christensen plays the role of Stephen Glass seriously. The process of production was a disaster at first, since Ray tried to convince the real-life people to work on “Shattered Glass” with him. Former news editor of the News Republic Michael Kelly (in the film he is portrayed by Hank Azaria) had a hard time being convinced by the director to be part of “Shattered Glass.” The reason for this hard decision is because Kelly felt embarrassed that he worked with a journalist (Stephen Glass) that fabricated articles and published them. Later though, Ray convinced Kelly to help out with the film once Ray said he was approaching the story as a journalist. He informed Kelly that he wanted the script to be factually accurate as can be. Once that task was a success, two colleagues Charles Lane (in the film he is portrayed by Peter Saarsgard) and Hannah Rosin worked as advisers for Billy Ray. The character Caitlin Avey (portrayed by Chloe Sevigny) is loosely based off of Hannah Rosin.

The film’s introduction is the life of Stephen Glass (Christensen): a smart, and devoted journalist, and a student trying to finish his law degree; his colleague Charles Lane (Saarsgard) is short-fused and gets aggravated easily; another colleague Caitlin Avey (Sevigny) who is a close-friend of Glass but thinks that Lane is too hard on everyone; and a caring editor Michael Kelly (Azaria) that lacks dialogue. An organized man but is not good with confrontations.

 Glass writes a story about a company called Jukt Micronics. Which is a big event that consists of a hacker at the age of fifteen and is trying to make a name for himself.  This story is one that never happened, but the rest of the News Republic is not aware of the problem yet. The issue is that Glass just makes situations worse and does not resolve any of the conflicts he is putting himself into. He just keeps on trying to find ways to cheat his way out of getting caught, and he does this by fabricating article after article.

Before the Jukt Micronics issue happens, Glass was assigned to do research and write an article on Drug Abuse Resistance Education. He did go to the conference regarding what he was suppose to write about, but admits he messed up (where he actually lied). Later though, the News Republic gets letters of distortions and lies that they found written by Glass. Glass’s window is closing.