You hear the phrase “film is a director’s medium” all the time. It’s meant to convey that the director on a film, more often than not, is the one who has and then is responsible for realizing a vision. There are cases where that’s demonstrably not the case – and I’m not just talking about times where there was a troubled set or even where the director ultimately disavowed his involvement with a movie – but in my opinion there’s no more clear example of that being true than Edward Scissorhands.
Burton’s fourth feature film as director, it has all the signs of an artist working at the height of his creative power. From the suburban setting whose unseemly underbelly is soon exposed by the introduction of a variable into the mix to Edward essentially embodying late 80’s/early 90’s disaffected youth who felt they were so outside the norm they must have been created in a lab, it’s everything Burton would come to be associated with.
It struck me during one of the opening shots of Dianne Wiest ascending the staircase of the castle Edward lives in just how much Burton’s fingerprints are all over the set design of the movie, adding to the influence he had on the look and feel of the movie. All those gothic swirls, all the gray brick…This is the Burton style and it’s easy to imagine his concept drawings being recreated on the set under the director’s meticulous eye.
But before we knew all that the studio – in this case Fox – had to sell the movie.
The trailer largely follows the movie’s story in chronological order, with a couple things misplaced here and there for dramatic effect. It focuses on the feeling of Edward being an outsider who’s trying to integrate into “normal” society, with only a few hints about how poorly that turns out. We meet the family Edward will be staying with and how that happens and some of the other neighborhood characters he and we will meet. Depp is fully on display here but not in the same way he would be in later years after he became so well known for eccentric performances like this. Interestingly this doesn’t seem to be trying too hard to sell the movie to a teenage audience. If it were I’d expect more focus on the relationship between Edward and Kim (Winona Ryder) and less on the family drama, which tells me the studio was targeting mostly an adult audience, which may be indicative of where the movie industry was in 1990.
The posters hit a similar note. There were a pair that featured the copy “Edward was here,” with one looking down the street at the topiary Edward creates in the movie and another showing a bunch of women and one dog with outrageous haircuts, both clearly meant to imply Edward had practiced his arts on the objects at hand. Another featured Depp and Ryder in an embrace with copy proclaiming Edward to be “An uncommonly gentle man” and going on to more clearly play up the romantic angle of the movie, which is in actuality very little of the story itself. Still another poster focused solely on Edward and positions this movie as being from the director of Beetlejuice and Batman, an early indicator of how the director would become a brand name in and of himself.
Despite the nods to Burton I’m a bit surprised at how the director’s visual style isn’t really on display in the campaign. Sure the “Edward was here” posters show some stuff but even the trailer is light on the emotional set design the director had put on display in the movie. Fox seems intent here on selling it as a drama as opposed to a visual treat. While I can see where they’re coming from, the fact that they wouldn’t place all their cards on Burton’s vision – he was the hot director at this time – seems odd in retrospect.
