How To Break Into Commercial Directing (4 Steps)

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about a frustrating question in my own career:

How do I get more opportunities to direct commercials?

Documentary directing has been a pretty strong part of my career. I understand that world. I have the body of work. People can look at what I’ve made and understand why they might hire me to make another documentary.

Commercial directing has been different.

I’ve directed commercials. I know I can do the work. But getting consistently considered for bigger commercial projects is another problem entirely.

That’s one reason my recent conversation with director Michael Fagan hit me harder than I expected.

Michael started where a lot of filmmakers start: corporate interviews, B-roll, smaller $5,000 and $10,000 production jobs.

Today, he’s directing commercials with budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for major brands.

Here’s the video below if you’d prefer to watch, or you can read on.

My conversation on YouTube.

I wanted to know what happened in between.

And one answer kept coming up:

At some point, you have to give people evidence that you can do the work you want before they’re willing to hire you to do it.

Your portfolio can become a trap

There’s a weird chicken-and-egg problem in directing.

You need great commercial work to get hired for great commercial work.

But how do you make that work if nobody will hire you yet?

Michael eventually found an opportunity through an existing client.

Someone floated the idea of making a period toothpaste commercial set in the 1800s. The budget was around $20,000.

Michael estimated that doing something like it conventionally might require at least $100,000.

He took the job anyway.

He and his team poured far more into the finished piece than the economics of that individual job probably justified.

And it became a turning point.

As Michael put it, they didn’t really make money on the project. But the commercial got someone’s attention. Then that person led to someone else. And the whole thing began to snowball. Pasted markdown

That idea has been sticking with me.

There are projects where the right question is:

How much profit can we make on this?

But every once in a while, there might be another kind of project where the better question is:

What could this piece of work unlock?

That doesn’t mean losing money on every cool project that shows up. That’s a great way to go out of business.

It means recognizing that occasionally the value of the finished work might be greater than the value of the job itself.

I think I’ve struggled with the next part even more

Once Michael had work he believed in, he did something that makes a lot of creative people uncomfortable.

He narrowed down.

Michael had sports work. Documentary-style work. Corporate work. Comedy.

Instead of presenting all of it, he essentially started saying:

“I’m a comedy director.”

He emailed roughly ten production companies. Around eight replied.

One of the biggest production companies in his market hired him for a roughly $200,000 shoot—even though Michael said he had probably never worked on a job that large before. Pasted markdown

When I asked why he thought that worked, his answer was simple:

He was easier to remember.

That one has been rattling around in my head.

Because I’ve spent a lot of my career doing different things.

Documentaries. Commercials. Branded content. Production. Running a company. Teaching filmmakers.

And there’s real value in being able to do all of those things.

But there may also be a cost.

If someone visits my website, is it instantly obvious:

“This is the person I should call to direct this commercial”?

Or am I making them do too much work to figure that out?

Versatility can be incredibly useful once somebody hires you.

I’m becoming less convinced that versatility is always useful when you’re trying to get hired in the first place.

You probably don’t need to feel 100% ready

I asked Michael how certain he needs to be before accepting a project that feels above his current level.

His answer surprised me.

About 65 or 70 percent.

Not 100.

His analogy was that he’s studied for the test. He thinks he knows the answer. But he doesn’t know for certain until he actually does it.

That feels much closer to my experience of directing than the way we sometimes talk about “confidence.”

There’s a version of confidence that sounds like:

I know exactly how this is going to work.

I’m not sure directing feels like that very often.

It’s more like:

I think I know how we can make this work. I’ve prepared as much as I can. Now we’re going to find out.

Michael told me he still experiences that feeling on major commercial jobs.

The budgets change.

The uncertainty doesn’t entirely disappear.

Then comes the part nobody sees

Michael has another idea he calls keeping “a thousand arrows in the sky.”

It means constantly creating opportunities.

Emails.

Meetings.

Relationships.

Keeping the website current.

Showing people what you just made.

Following up.

Putting enough possibilities into motion that your career isn’t dependent on one person saying yes.

Michael told me he’d received somewhere around 50–70 commercial boards and hadn’t even heard back on roughly 45 of them.

And he could still end up booking three jobs in a month. Pasted markdown

That might be the most useful perspective shift from our whole conversation.

From the outside, somebody’s career looks like a sequence of wins.

You see the Duracell commercial.

You see the $200,000 shoot.

You see the new project announcement.

You don’t see the 45 opportunities that disappeared into a black hole.

That’s especially useful for me to remember while I’m trying to grow the commercial side of my own directing career.

Maybe the goal isn’t to somehow eliminate rejection.

Maybe the goal is to create enough opportunities that rejection stops being the thing that determines what happens next.

So what am I taking from this?

I don’t think the answer is to burn down everything I’ve built and suddenly declare myself one hyper-specific kind of director.

But I am asking harder questions about what I’m showing people.

What work do I actually want more of?

Does my portfolio make that obvious?

Am I waiting to be hired for that work—or am I creating evidence that I can already do it?

And maybe most importantly:

Am I putting enough arrows in the sky?

I also asked Michael a question that I think is useful for anyone trying to move into higher-level commercial work:

If your entire portfolio vanished tomorrow and you had to become a commercial director again from zero, what would you do?

His answer was extremely specific—and different from the way he originally built his own portfolio.

That’s part of the full conversation below.

And if you’re trying to make that same jump, I’d be curious to hear what part you find hardest: making the work, figuring out your niche, or getting into the rooms where the bigger jobs are actually awarded.