Insidious Chapter 3 – Interviews: Leigh Whannell, Lin Shaye, Dermot Mulroney, and Stefanie Scott
Staci Layne Wilson
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You couldn’t wish to find a nicer bunch. When I caught up with Insidious Chapter 3 writer-director Leigh Whannell and cast members Lin Shaye, Dermot Mulroney, and Stefanie Scott in L.A. recently, I had the best time talking with them. They are perfectly sweet, presentable, well-mannered folks – except for one thing: They want to scare you to death.
Below are the highlights of our interviews; be sure to watch the videos at the bottom of the page for even more!
“I think each of the Insidious films all together – or Insidi-i, as I like to refer to them all as one – elevated horror automatically from that first movie,” says Mulroney. “It just made everybody go, ‘Well, you don’t need tons of special effects. You don’t need to have a bloody, axe-wielding maniac.’ You can just make people scared because you’re telling them a good story that they’re connected to.”
“So, and now by chapter three, that’s the goal. It isn’t just to whip off a low-budget movie and make tons of money back. It’s to make quality movies. And so, for a company like Blumhouse to have that as their top priority, at least that is stated, then, I’m in.” Mulroney adds that this is, after dozens of years acting, his first real fright flick. “I was kind of on the sidelines waiting to get called in to play horror.”
Scott is a longtime horror fan, and she had already seen the first two Insidious movies long before being called in to audition for the character of Quinn in Chapter 3. What she likes about the series is, “It really has suspense.” When asked what it’s like to sort of demystify it all, having been an actor in one of these movies now, she says, “It’s totally different behind the scenes. Obviously I know what’s going to happen, but I also feel when you see it again, it’s like a year later, so you kind of forget about a lot of the things. So you can totally get lost in the story. I think I get most scared when I’m watching Lin in her scare scenes. Once they add the music and everything, that’s when it makes it really terrifying.”
It’s not all jump scares and things that go bump in the night. While the first two movies were more story-driven, this one feels more character-driven, especially to Shaye. “This time I was totally a participant in the mood and in the story element of loss and grief,” says Shaye. Her character Elise had a backstory in Shaye’s mind for the first two movies, but Leigh brought it to fruition in a different way for Chapter 3. “Loss and grief are the elements that brings Elise, Quinn, and Tucker and Specs together. Quinn touches something in me [as Elise] that I recognize so to me that was just a beautiful way that Leigh intertwined everybody.”
Whannell’s words were of particular importance. He’s always been a writer (beginning with the Saw short in 2003) but never a director. Shaye talked about how those two elements – writing and directing – came together on the set. “He’s a phenomenally skilled writer. Skilled, as well as good. He knows exactly what he wants. He picks the word because it’s the right word.”
“I had one scene where I was with with Specs and Tucker, and I kept saying the word ‘night’ instead of ‘darkness’ even though Lee had written ‘darkness.’ I just kept getting the word wrong when doing the scene, and Leigh was saying, ‘It’s darkness.’ He said, ‘I picked each word. Night and darkness have two different meanings.’ I thought: he’s 100% right. So it’s very clear that he is careful about what he chooses, and I feel very respectful and dutiful to get his words exactly as he wrote them.”
When I asked Whannell whether or not he’d ever want to write a novel, he said yes – but he’d want to take a year off to do it right. His wife is currently writing a novel, and he has the utmost “respect for the process.” He does love to read in his spare time and has always been a fan of the written word.
Whannell also enjoys acting (he’s done more than just Saw and the Insidious movies) and says that directing himself as an actor was tougher than he thought it would be. “It’s definitely a split personality thing that happens, where you’re being torn in two different directions. I found that if there was a tug of war happening, the directing side won by a landslide because my attention was on the film overall. I think in that way it let me relax as an actor; because I wasn’t concentrating [on the minutia], there were none of those nerves that you sometimes have as an actor. Like, when someone calls ‘action’ and all your focus is on saying your lines, you can get to be very nervous and you build this molehill up to a mountain because you’re focused on what you’re going to do and about hitting your marks and saying your lines the right way. Well, all of that went out the window.”
What didn’t go out the window was the scare factor. Whannell learned a lot from watching James Wan direct some of the scariest movies of this millennia to date – Saw, Dead Silence, The Conjuring, and of course Insidious and Insidious Chapter 2 – but he admits it was fun to turn the tables on his friend. Wan has a small cameo in Insidious Chapter 3, in which he plays – typecasting alert – a director. The scene takes place during an audition held in a theater and brings to mind Roy Scheider in All That Jazz. “He’s that much feared disembodied voice that is in the dark telling you that you didn’t quite get it right,” Whannell says, then laughs, “I had a lot of fun ribbing him, and I took out a lot of vengeance. I was sort of joking around but I was half-joking. He did great and it was almost annoying how well he did playing the director!”
Insidious Chapter 3 will be hitting theaters on June 5, 2015. It stars Dermot Mulroney, Stefanie Scott, Lin Shaye, Angus Sampson, and writer/director Leigh Whannell.
Related Story: Insidious Chapter 3 to Pave Way for Several New Installments?
Synopsis:
The newest chapter in the terrifying horror series is written and directed by franchise co-creator Leigh Whannell. This chilling prequel, set before the haunting of the Lambert family, reveals how gifted psychic Elise Rainier (Shaye) reluctantly agrees to use her ability to contact the dead in order to help a teenage girl (Scott) who has been targeted by a dangerous supernatural entity.
For more information visit the official Insidious website, “like” the Insidious Facebook page, and follow along on Twitter at @InsidiousMovie.
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