The determination of the $DD^{*}$ scattering amplitude from lattice QCD is complicated by long-range interactions. In particular, the Lüscher method is no longer applicable in the kinematical region close to the left-hand cut. We tackle this problem by adopting plane-wave and effective-field-theoretic methods, which also address partial wave mixing. In addition, we incorporate a diquark-antidiquark interpolator in the operator basis (along with the relevant scattering operators) in order to achieve a better resolution of the energy spectrum. Results show that inclusion of it already has some impact at physical charm quark mass, although it is more significant for larger heavy quark masses, in line with expectations.