This year's would-be blockbuster Warcraft endured a critical pummelling and failed to set the box office alight either here or in the US. Internationally, however, the results were better, with the rest of Europe, Russia and China edging the film's receipts north of $400m. Whether a sequel is likely remains to be seen, but director Duncan Jones, bruised but not beaten, says he's not averse to returning to Azeroth. "Maybe I'm just being a masochist," he tells Thrillist.
Likening the experience of making a massive studio movie to a "death of a thousand cuts", he says there was much compromise in Warcraft's four-year journey to the screen, but that there will never be an altered director's cut.
"With a film like this, where there are so many visual effects, every concession that you make you lose those shots," he explains. "They cease to exist because the effects work never gets done. Some of it's not even at that stage. You go through a writing stage right up to the deadline of shooting the thing. [You lose] ideas in the writing process. Then sets change for whatever reason and notes come in. You're changing things around a three-and-a-half-year process. You get these little changes which are constantly course-correcting you. So there is no possibility of there ever being a director's cut. It's purely in my head."
Battles with studio bureaucracy aside, however, Jones remains upbeat and philosophical about the entire Warcraft experience.
"I'm equally proud and furious about Warcraft," he reflects. "I love it. I spent so much time on it. I put all my heart into trying to make it work. Parts of it, I think, work, but it also drives me crazy that I wasn't able to push through everything that I knew needed to happen in order to make the film I knew it could be. If there were an opportunity for us to make another film in the Warcraft universe I really feel like we did the hard work in the first movie as far as setting the table. I would love to capitalise on three-and-a-half years of hard work and be able to have some fun in that world now that I've done the hard work. [So] who knows?"
Jones' next film, the smaller, more independent and more controllable Mute, is currently in pre-production. For much more Warcraft chat, seek out Empire's exclusive Duncan Jones podcast. Warcraft is out on DVD and Blu-ray on 10 October.