Scissors Wizard

The director behind Cadillac’s Scissorhands spot — and much more — keeps his focus on the script.

Dana Feldman

With hundreds of commercials and an Emmy to his name, director David Shane is an expert storyteller whose ads and short films play out like mini-movies.

This year, two of his spots aired during the Super Bowl: that buzzworthy Edward Scissorhands spoof for Cadillac, starring Timothée Chalamet and Winona Ryder, and the star-studded "Journey to the Peak" series touting the Paramount+ streaming service.

"The script is everything," he says, "and the building blocks of any story are the same: where's the dramatic conflict? Where's the comedic friction? I'm always mining moments for believable human behavior. I don't care if I'm doing a 30-second commercial, a branded content film or a TikTok video, as long as it's a really smart, funny idea."

Telling a story in 30 or 60 seconds presents particular challenges. "It's imperative the moment lives its natural life onscreen, but often you need to compress because of the finite screen time. The trick is to make it look like you breathed life into it."

So much relies on the onscreen talent, he says. "You need great actors with a strong internal clock to do that. I look for actors who are always processing — you can see the wheels turning. Michael K. Williams is riveting because he's committed to this kind of interior acting." Williams stars in Typecast, one of the short films Shane made for The Atlantic and HBO as part of their "Question Your Answers" series.

Shane — whose Bud Light "Swear Jar" spot for DDB Chicago, won the Emmy in 2008 for Outstanding Commercial — is a partner in O Positive Films, a bicoastal production company that specializes in commercials.

That said, he's working on a TV pilot called Driven, which stars Rebecca Henderson (Russian Doll). It's a "quirky indie dramedy," he says, "about a deaf wannabe yodeler who insinuates herself into the life of a failed novelist-turned-Uber driver who lives in her brother's laundry room."

Still, the effects of the pandemic on commercial production — and content — aren't soon forgotten. "We started shooting again in June [2020]," Shane recalls, "and those early ads were comedies about people longing to emerge from their Covid cocoons. They were very much about the pandemic, even when they weren't explicitly about the pandemic."

Shooting protocols also changed. "The Paramount+ shoot was crazy. We had 10 actors in one scene and could only shoot one at a time. It's not easy to create an organic moment when the actors aren't together."

The ad features more than a dozen notables — including Patrick Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Gayle King and James Corden — chatting about the new streaming service atop a snowy mountain. Filming so many stars in multiple states, Shane says, "was a bit of a quadratic equation."

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 7, 2021