Once Wan secured the casting of his leads, they all gathered to begin work on the film.

“It’s one of those three week shoots with an $800,000 budget. And we were shooting in Highland Park, and we had honey wagons kind of lined up and there was some guy who kept marching back and forth with a cellphone. And I went to security and I said, ‘Keep an eye on this guy because he’s walking by our trailers looking like he’s just talking on his phone.’ I didn’t realize it was Jason Blum until later,” the actress laughed. “I sat down for lunch that day and there he was sitting across from me and I said, ‘Oh my god, I nearly had you arrested.'”

It was after the success of the second film that Wan approached her with the news that he wanted to tailor the franchise around her character, Elise, because audiences seemed to connect to her. After three films, Shaye knows the character better than anyone and she admits to feeling very protective of Elise and what she would and wouldn’t do and she elaborated with a short conversation she’d had with Leigh when they were preparing for the fourth installment.

Whannell had approached Lin and told her he’d put a lot of her into the new script, and she laughed but after she read it she approached the writer of all four films in the franchise about a couple of sticking points for her.

“When this film opens, now these guys (Specks and Tucker) are living in my house, and we’ve become a family together and they’re like my sons. So, he had her saying “damn it” or something like that and I said to him  that Elise does not swear. She doesn’t call the guys “guys” she calls them “boys” and she does not swear except every so often when she squares off with a demon. And I don’t know why I know that but I totally know that.”

Luckily, from the beginning, Leigh has been open to discussing points like this with her. She said she’s often joked with him that he writes in Australian.

“Leigh is one of the most exquisite writers. There’s a cadence and an inversion of thought that is very kind of European, not American, in the way he writes. We’re very glib. We’re very colloquial. The way he writes is very beautiful and every word is picked for a reason.”

At one point, while filming the third installment, she was having trouble with particular line. She kept saying “the night” instead of “the darkness” and Leigh finally stopped everything and told her gently that the word should be “darkness” because “darkness” and “night” are two different things and completely change the context of what she was saying.

“And he was completely right,” she continued. “So, if I feel like something needs to shift, he and I would have a discussion about it. He’d say I need this word because this word means this. Or this word means that. So, if I felt like something was being expressed differently than the way Elise would do it, then he and I would talk about it.”

The actress considers herself thrice blessed with the directors she’s had in the franchise. Each has brought their own experience and perspective to the films and each, she says, has taught her something new.

“James is a visionary,” she began. “When I worked with James, I never got one note from him the entire shoot except things like discussing the Further. It wasn’t about a certain way of feeling or anything like that. He figured that was my job. He would bring in the detail that he paints his story with. He knows how he wants it to look. He sees the world through a camera lens. And he’s also a fantastic artist.”

“With Leigh, it was different because he’s also an actor and a writer. He pushes me in different ways and I learn a lot from him and his perspective. I remember one time I was playing the intention of a scene to make Specks feel better and explain that what he did was really the right thing to do. I played it another way trying to comfort him and we ended up doing it a couple of times. And then Leigh sort of reluctantly said, ‘I don’t think that’s what this is. I think this is a more cosmic thought that she’s having about the world.’ And he was 100% right. And suddenly the whole scene took on this gravity. There was a gravity to what she was talking about. It didn’t have an actor’s intention or a character intention. It didn’t have any of that stuff, which would work, but this had so much more gravity and information, like cosmic information in it. And the scene was totally gorgeous.”

And what about her newest director?

“Adam Robitel is a fantastic listener. He’s a much better listener than I am. I’m not a very good listener sometimes. I’ll confess that. I get a little bit like, ‘leave me alone I know how to do this’ and then I get it wrong and I feel so stupid. But then I will admit that I made a mistake. I give up easily when I know I’m wrong. I learned a lot about myself on this shoot. I grew up a lot on this set. An example, I was worried because this was a really emotional story and I didn’t want Elise to be crying through this whole movie. And he said, “As long as there is emotional truth to what you’re doing, don’t worry. You know he said, you can do it and then we can do another version where you’re less outwardly emotional and just have the emotion underneath the surface. And that’s what we would often do.  We’d do the same scene in maybe two different ways, but the emotional content was there just expressed differently in two different takes. He never shut me down. That’s really heavenly as an actor.”

So what’s on the horizon for the actress? With Insidious Chapter 4 in post production, you can also look for her in an upcoming release called Midnight Man with Robert Englund and also in Darren Lynn Bousman’s new film, Abattoir. One of Lin’s latest films just released on VOD and in limited theatrical release. That movie is Jack Goes Home, and in my own humble opinion, it’s one of the finest performances she’s ever given.

As my time with Lin was coming to a close, she reflected a bit on what she wants her life to be and unsurprisingly, it’s all about continuing her art.

“I mean here I am. I just turned 73, and I’m an action hero. I mean, I think, “Holy Shit” and I say fuck and shit a lot. But, I love being different people. I love stepping into the tornado of someone else. That’s what I hope continues if I have a wish for my own career.  I hope I can continue to play all kinds of people and expose them in a way that they’ve never been exposed before. There’s some element that makes it memorable and reaches down into your insides to make you think of something you haven’t thought about. That’s why I do what I do. I just hope people don’t get sick of me and I hope that I can work until the day I die.”

We do too, Lin. We hope the same thing.

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