This month marks the release of The Divergent Series: Allegiant, Shailene Woodley's third outing as YA heroine Tris Prior, so she's feeling pretty confident in the role at this point. And she's excited to get to work on the series' fourth and final installment, which films this summer—if they'd just send her a script for it… 

We recently chatted with Woodley about the third installment of the Divergent series; what fascinates her and her wish to one day be a director. 

You still have one more of these to go. What’s the mind-set at this point?

Clearly, there’s an end in sight, but you still have a whole other movie to shoot and promote. There’s a lot of feelings, just looking at this whole thing coming to an end. It’s strange to think that after this press tour, we’ll just have one more. After this summer, there will be no more films. It’s been such a journey of growth and growing with all of the people involved with these films, to say goodbye to them will be a bittersweet experience. 

It is a massive cast for the whole series.

Yeah, it is a massive cast. After the first film we all got very close—there’s like 12 of us—and then the second film a lot of people didn’t come back because their characters died. And then this film, we have a lot of new characters introduced, which has been really lovely. It’s always fun to have new people come on board, and we were really fortunate nobody in our cast is a dick, everybody has kind of got even-keel egos and really humble natures, so it’s easy to add new people because there’s no clique-y environment. Everyone’s all-embracing. 

Does it mess with your mind, the different relationships you’ve played with different co-stars like Miles Teller and Ansel Elgort?

Not at all, it’s just fun, you know. With Ansel, it was fun to do Fault in Our Stars because we were already so comfortable with one another that we really got to be vulnerable and sensitive and available with one another. And then Miles, going from Spectacular Now to this, we had such deep rapport with one another that there was a sense of comfortability, and comfortability lends to so much creativity between actors. 

The different levels of government and control in this series get pretty twisty. Did they give you a map for the series when you started? 

Well, we didn’t know what was gonna happen in the third movie because Veronica hadn’t written the third book when we started making the first film, so it was still up in the air as to what the next step in their evolution would be.

I’m assuming by now you know what happens next.

I don’t, actually. I haven’t seen the script and we just got a new director, so I think they’re trying to figure out what the storyline’s going to be and how it’s going to unfold. 

Do you have any guesses? 

I honestly have no idea because there was so much creative license in this film because of how they decided to create the Allegiant world and the Bureau world. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in Ascendant. Are they going to go back to the Bureau? Is the Bureau going to bring war to Chicago? We all know what happens at the end of that book with Tris and her fate, so what’s the lead-up going to look like to Tris’ final moments? I’m itching to see a script. 

Did they give you a timeframe for that? 

Yeah, one would think, but it seems when you have a specific start date and specific release date, there’s not a lot of time to create the script, so we don’t get the script until the last minute. 

Between these film, what other stuff have you been looking for? 

The cool thing is I don’t really ever look, I sort of just wait and see what comes up, and if it fuels a passion within me, then I fight for it. And I feel really fortunate to have that outlook, but I do look a little bit because I’m looking into creating with some friends and taking the next step to create our own material and work on our own material. 

What sort of platforms are you looking at? 

All sorts. I’m fascinated by children and what we can learn from children, and elders. They’re sort of two pockets in our society that we ignore the most, and yet the two pockets who have the most wisdom. Children have not developed ego yet, so they’re just pure wisdom. And elders have let go of ego because they’ve lived a life of pride, and they realize it does nothing for them, so they’re just living from wisdom. And instead our society just focuses on mid-20s to late-50s, where ego dominates our daily existence and sort of discredits those other two pockets where there’s a wealth of knowledge, so I’m fascinated by that. 

How would you explore that? 

I have no idea. Try to find stories, come up with story lines.

Are you looking at writing, directing or producing?

One day, I would love to do that. It would be really fun to direct. I would love to see what other people come up with. The beautiful thing about directing is you’re, like, orchestrating. You’re there but you’re kind of letting everyone else’s visions come together, you trust your DP, you trust your actors, I think all of that would be a fun process to explore.