Duncan Jones Is 'Equally Proud And Furious' About Warcraft

More than three years in the making, then savaged by critics and ignored by cinema-goers, it’s generally accepted that the big screen adaptation of online game ‘World of Warcraft’ was a bit of a disaster.

Now its director Duncan Jones has admitted that he’s equal parts ‘proud and furious’ about how things turned out, describing the production as being like ‘death of 1000 cuts’.

He also added that he was fully aware of the issues fans and critics picked up about the movie’s pacing.

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“I’m equally proud and furious about ‘Warcraft,’” he told Thrillist.

“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.”

“I know that the movie is not perfect and I think one of the absolute frustrations of making a movie of this scale is that it is impossible, I think, to make a movie like this as an independent filmmaker. You have to find a way to squeeze it through the studio bureaucracies.

“Trying to make a movie like ‘Warcraft,’ and trying to do it in a unique way… you get killed by a death of 1,000 cuts. Not just editing cuts. It’s little changes that seem really innocuous. As a filmmaker the only way that I understand how to make a film is holistically.

“Every choice that I make, whether it is story or character or costume, all works together. When you make a little change it doesn’t seem like a big deal. When you keep making those little changes, especially over three and a half years, suddenly you’re basically spending all of your time trying to work out how to patch up what has been messed around with.

“Trust me, if anyone is frustrated about the pacing of the film and how that turned out, it’s me. It’s not because I didn’t know what was happening, but as I said, death of 1,000 cuts.”

The movie made a disastrous $47 million in the US, and though it received a huge bump thanks to its release in China, where it made over $200 million, it wasn’t enough to save it from flopping.

In all, it made $433.5 million, and though it topped its $160 million production budget, once marketing and promotion costs are added, it will have made a loss for its studio Universal.

As for a sequel, Jones said: “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 capitalize 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? Maybe I’m just being a masochist.”

Currently, he’s scouting locations for his next film ‘Mute’, a sci-fi noir which is said to be ‘Blade Runner’-esque.

Image credits: Universal