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It’s been close to a decade, but director David Ayer still isn’t over what happened to his Suicide Squad movie. The director, whose A Working Man is currently in theaters, didn’t have final cut on the 2016 movie that introduced Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn to the world, and the version that did make it to the public included an almost entirely different third act (ghost-written by then DC CEO Geoff Johns), and an edit that was taken out of Ayer’s hands. After that version proved unpopular with critics and audiences, it’s not surprising that Ayer wishes people could see the movie he actually set out to make.

“I was coming off Fury and I could kind of do anything I wanted. And I wanted to make a comic book movie. I wanted to do what the cool kids were doing,” Ayer told Vulture. “I went in and I made what I felt was this really human war movie. My Suicide Squad was a war movie. I had just come off a war movie and I made another war movie.”

Ayer’s version of the movie, he explained, had “a lot of character evolution. The first act in my film was all the backstory of Rick Flag and June Moone and their relationship and how they met. And the Joker-Harley Quinn backstory was more in keeping with the comic books, where it was this toxic relationship she had to escape from. So much context and setup and storylines were removed.”

What particularly frustrates Ayer, he said, was just how different his version is from the critically savaged Suicide Squad that arrived in theaters.

“Normally, director’s cuts are like, ‘Okay, we put back in the deleted scenes’ or whatever. No, this is an entire re-conception,” he argued. “I didn’t have a single needle drop in the film. Steven Price, who did Fury, wrote this beautiful intricate score. My film was gothic and lyrical and dramatic. The people that have seen my cut, it’s all been the same reaction: They get mad. ‘This is what we wanted. Why didn’t we get to see this?’ There are flaws in it, but I think I made a really good film.”

So, what made Warner Bros. change the movie so much? Ayer was blunt about the cause — and it’s the DC movie that preceded Suicide Squad. “The studio got ambushed by Batman v. Superman, and the release of that wasn’t the outcome they expected,” he suggested.

For years, Ayer has campaigned for his cut of the movie to be released, although he’s recently admitted that’s unlikely to happen as James Gunn and Peter Safran prepare to reboot the DCU with Superman. For now, he says, his ambition is suitably low key: “Would I love a screening? Just a screening, and let some film people see it? Yeah.”

The studio cut of Suicide Squad is available to stream on Max. Apparently, it’s not what the filmmaker intended at all.

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