Psychic tradition has been part of history for thousands of years, yet the process can still feel mysterious to many. Documentarian Lana Wilson, who previously captured portraits of Taylor Swift and Brooke Shields, found herself curious about the field during the pandemic while living in NYC.
So, with her film crew, she set out to capture psychics working in the city and the result is the fascinating Look Into My Eyes, a Sundance-premiering documentary that touches on the eccentric lives of those who dedicate their lives, amongst other artistic pursuits, to connecting with the souls of many that come to them to seek solace and resolution.
Ahead of the film’s theatrical release from A24, I spoke with Lana Wilson about her approach to the film and working with the psychics, psychic readings versus therapy, obsessions with art, putting on a performance, the loneliness (and connection) in NYC, and much more.
The Film Stage: To begin, what was your approach to working with the psychics and the clients and how you ensured you were unobtrusive while filming sessions?
Lana Wilson: To find the psychics, I and a team of three people actually went out and got psychic readings ourselves. We didn’t say, “We’re looking for people to be in a documentary,” or anything like that. We wanted to just go in as clients and have an experience of a reading with them and I was doing that in part because often if you do a casting process in a documentary, it leads to a lot of aspiring actors applying. Little did I know, I would still end up with aspiring actors. But mostly through that process. I just wanted to get away from the people who are doing this work––and there are many––to make money, to con people. I was looking for people who were sincere. You can agree or disagree if what they’re doing is real or not, or if you believe in it or not. But I needed the actual people to be sincere and I was also looking for psychics who had a kind of personal depth to them.
After those over 100 sessions and comparing notes and all of that, that’s when I was drawn towards a certain number of people. We filmed with three more psychics who we ended up not having in the final film––only a little bit with each of them, though. I really zeroed in on this particular group. But with the clients, we found them by setting up tables all over the city. I actually had a group of production assistants who spoke a combined total of eleven languages and this didn’t really come to fruition in the film, but we actually translated our signs and paperwork into multiple different languages. It was COVID, so I was like, well, where do people go? I wanted to find people in an organic way, so we set up these tables that had signs that said “Free Psychic Readings.” And so if you came over to the table––and they were at grocery stores, parks, farmers markets in all five boroughs of the city––if you came over to the table and started talking to the person there and said, “I’m interested in the free psychic reading,” they would explain, “We’re filming a whole bunch of different readings. Are you okay with us filming your reading?” And if they said yes, then my story producer would then Zoom with them and get to know them a little bit and have a sense of what kind of questions they would want to ask. And then we would match them with psychics. So they knew going in that there was filming and were okay with that and we didn’t tell the psychics who was coming in every day. It was just a surprise. And with the filming style, it took a little bit of experimentation to get there but, the first thing is that visually, I was really inspired by Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film After Life. Have you seen this movie?
Yes, I love it.
So, I did an obsessive, 25-page analysis of After Life at one point because looking at the difference between camera and tripod and handheld camera in that film and how that interplay works and what it tells you and when. Because the thing I loved about that film, I love the documentary-style neutrality of those interviews with the people, and I knew that I wanted to play in this film with this comparison between psychic-client relationship and the director-subject relationship. There was that, but also that film doesn’t reveal the main characters until quite far in it. It has a similar structure in that it starts with the dead people and the counselors. But you see a shot of that girl who works as one of the interviewers. You only have a shot of her like nineteen minutes into the film, and you don’t leave the counseling rooms with her until thirty minutes into the film. And I found that such a challenging and surprising and exciting viewing experience. I wanted to do something like that, and so ultimately I came up with the idea. I think I figured this out by shooting day number 3 or 4, of let’s film the psychic sessions in this pretty rigid, locked down way. So this locked-down camera on the client and one other camera, also on a tripod on the psychic. The psychic shot could not be anything like the client shot; it was going to be a different perspective; profile at three-quarters. Because I wanted to emphasize the interplay on the client’s face watching them, wondering if they are believing or are they not. What’s it’s like for them?
But the way we filmed it to make it as unobtrusive as possible was the camera in front of the client was unmanned. So they would see a camera over the psychic’s shoulder but there’s no person there. And my [Director of Photography] – who’s also a great director named Steven Maing – was operating the second camera. I wish I could draw a diagram for you. He was out of the eye line of the client. The client, maybe they would be vaguely aware of a tiny bit of movement, but only the psychic would see Steven. The client wouldn’t see him. So in that way, I really have over all of my films, I’ve learned that it does make a difference just simply not feeling like people are looking at you. Just not feeling eyes on you. So the only person that the client would have a sense of was a little bit of Steven’s movement, but they wouldn’t see him. The rest of us, we were remote-focusing the camera on the client. I was hiding in another room or behind a curtain or something, listening, watching on a monitor. Then I created the second visual style that’s basically the chaos, the rough and tumble of psychics at home. It’s handheld and intentionally sloppy, like there’s a boom in the shot, you’re bumping into things, there’s crap everywhere. I really wanted it to be this contrast of the orderly template of the psychic sessions and the way those sessions are trying to bring a kind of organization or meaning to the world, and then the psychics at home are much more chaotic and out of control.
As you get to know the psychics more in their home life there’s a certain sense of loneliness and past trauma that emerges. They find comfort in an obsession with cinema and art in general. Can you talk about kind of discovering that? It was so fun and surprising to see the John Waters obsessions and all of that.
I had the same experience as you in a way and I tried to kind of put my experience in the film because, yeah, I didn’t realize how much they all had in common until I got into it. And I started to slowly realize at a certain point, okay, I picked this group of seven people out of over the hundred who we met, and I started to kind of see them as these like funhouse mirror reflections of myself in a way. I was like, okay, they’re obsessed with movies, I have many of the same books as they do, they’re lonely, they have some kind of formative trauma. I was just like, did I just pick these weird versions of myself? Certainly, you gravitate in any film towards subjects who you feel comfortable with and who you want to collaborate with and who you connect to. That’s when I started to slowly realize that I’m interviewing them and I’m like, “Am I asking them the same questions that they asked a client?”
So it really was something I discovered while filming this parallel relationship of me and them and then the clients, where I think any subject I’ve made a film about, whether they’re a famous person or not, the reason they want to do it is that they have some kind of curiosity of, “What would it be like if I let this complete stranger witness me and hold a mirror up and tell a story about what they see and reflect the mirror back at me? What would come out of that?” And it’s very brave. Having not been a documentary subject, it seems terrifying to me. It’s a very brave thing to do, a very vulnerable thing to do. And so as I started to experience those parallels myself, I just thought, this is a huge part of the film too, because they’re into cinema for the same reason that some people are into psychic readings or into religion. At least that’s why one of the reasons I’ve always gone to movie theaters is to reflect on things, to learn about myself, to learn about the world, to try to give some meaning and find some meaning in a world that, on the surface, makes no sense. And, so looking for how all of these things––art, religion, and psychic tradition––can be vehicles for understanding ourselves in the world, for processing grief, that became a huge part of the project.
Capturing this in New York City, obviously there’s just a lot of people and psychics and a large pool of subjects, I’m curious if this felt unique to the location for you: for most psychics, this is just a side hustle and they also have bigger aspirations. Then in terms of the client side, do you feel there’s often more loneliness and soul-searching in a bigger city?
Totally, I think both of those things are absolutely true. They all have multiple jobs, they’re hustling, they have a day job, they’re doing part-time stuff as a psychic but then they’re also writing screenplays and coming up with one-person show ideas and taking singing lessons. I do find that total commitment to art and creativity a part of so many New Yorkers, regardless of whether they work professionally in the arts or not. I love that aspect. I don’t know if it’s true of psychics in other areas. I only talked to psychics in New York, and I knew from the beginning I wanted this to be only New York City, because well, first of all it was the pandemic so I couldn’t go anywhere else. I had this idea about making a film about psychic readings a while ago, but when the pandemic started, I thought, this is the moment to do it because, as you say, there is a lot of loneliness in New York. In another way, I think there’s something great about that because in New York I think it’s a nice place to be lonely in because everyone else is so lonely. And it’s true. I think that we’re more acutely conscious of being lonely when we’re all jammed together. Someone who lives alone is statistically less lonely than someone who lives with other people. Isn’t that interesting?
Because loneliness comes from comparing yourself to other people and, actually, loneliness is worse if you’re with someone else and feel lonely. There’s something about that and about the fact that loneliness, I think is common, but also totally acceptable and fine in New York, because it’s not a place people come to start a conventional family system, for instance. It’s not like, “I want to get married and have children. I’m going to go to New York City.” [Laughs.] You can be different here, you can be totally unconventional, you can exist in all sorts of ways that might not be acceptable in other places in the country. And so, when the pandemic began, everyone experienced loneliness in a different, heightened way. Everyone was more anxious about the future than ever before.
But I was also in the city the whole pandemic, and I was really struck by how, yeah, we kind of came to understand the preciousness of human connection more than ever but also, strangers were really there for each other in this remarkable way. At least I experienced this in my building, on my block, people were really supporting each other. And I think all of those things you can kind of see in the psychic practice as well. And the other thing I noticed that I’ll throw in there is that I was expecting many more people to be asking about their love lives. I wonder if it’s a particularly New York thing that people had more existential questions about their careers or their future, these really big picture, really profound issues they were grappling with. Very little “What’s my love life going to be like?”
I always find it fascinating when the psychics feel like they’re making a connection, but then it turns out not to be the right direction and they have to kind of pivot. For clients, perhaps because they’re so hungry and searching for something, they’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and do that. As you filmed so many hours, were you surprised by that and notice that kind of performance the psychic had to put on?
Totally. I also observed that. Sometimes I’d be like, “Wow, the client is still here.” But I think it speaks to what a collaborative experience this is. The clients are going and looking for something, seeking something, searching for something. They want questions answered or they want this chance to look at themselves in their life in a new way. And I think if they go in genuinely wanting that, they’ll get it. It almost doesn’t matter what the psychic says. Or in another way, I think it also might be enough that this psychic is listening to them deeply and giving them sustained attention. That’s meaningful in itself, too. I loved watching these sessions and sometimes thinking, you know, are these two people sitting at the table actually connecting to a ghost, or are they having this experience of collaborative make-believe? No one’s disingenuous here. Everyone’s completely sincere. I even think of that scene in the middle of the film where the woman talks to the client who is asking about his great-great-great-grandfather who was sold for fifty dollars. And they are both seeing an image together. They’re having this shared visualization experience. And I think that’s incredibly powerful. And what was so surprising to me was that in the end, it became so much less about the client literally believing what the psychic was saying, but more about what was this shared emotional experience that they’re having together? Because even if they feel that the psychic is not really connecting to them and it doesn’t make sense, they keep going because they want to get something out of this. And it might just be as simple as comfort sometimes.
Similar to that, I feel like it’s an age-old question of what is more beneficial: psychic readings vs. actual therapy. Do you see it as an either/or thing or can you find something helpful in both methods? And why do you think some people are maybe solely drawn to psychics? Do you think it’s just about accessibility or something greater?
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different reasons. I think accessibility is a factor. I think there’s cultural reasons for sure. Psychic tradition has existed for much longer than therapy has. Psychics have existed for longer than when the English language was created. This has been a part of cultures all over the world since the beginning of time. And, I think that there’s a reason for that. I think a lot of people are doing therapy and psychic readings. The other thing is that what I kept hearing from clients over and over… one of the psychics in the film, Phoebe, the animal intuitive person, says this helped more than therapy ever did. A lot of people are going to therapy. But then you go to a psychic reading and it’s a one-time commitment. It’s very cheap, usually. It’s a complete stranger and you usually leave feeling better and comforted. I am a huge therapy proponent and I have been going to therapy for many years. I usually leave therapy feeling quite heavy and a little down. And so I understand the appeal of going to a psychic reading. It’s just a completely different experience afterward. Again, I think there’s all kinds of arguments to be made about therapy versus psychic readings. I actually don’t think they serve the same function in a way. They are very different. But that’s what I heard mostly from clients who were there. Many of them were in therapy, but they were just like, I feel so good now after leaving this reading.
As you’ve screened the film have you found people who otherwise weren’t open to psychic readings now curious or if they found the movie kind of therapeutic in its own way?
Yeah, I would say that I think if people believe in psychics or don’t, I think the movie doesn’t change them. That’s kind of my attention in a way. It’s exploring that idea of do you believe or do you not believe? But does it matter? So I don’t think people emerge thinking, “I want to go see a psychic now!” at all but I do think they go in and are really surprised by seeing that psychic sessions are a way of processing grief and loss. It’s a big thing. Realizing this isn’t just about fortune telling necessarily. This isn’t about making guesses about the future or lotto tickets. This is about how we as humans cope with things we don’t have answers to and that are impossible to understand and kind of impossible to live without trying to find some kind of meaning or answers or comfort with these impossible situations and questions. So I think people are like, “Oh, this isn’t just about psychics. This is like a human tradition of listening, of connecting to each other through conversation, emotion, but also art, performance, religion.” We’re trying to connect to each other in all of these different ways, and I think we have this need for that that’s so great. It can feel magical when it happens, and it might just be our kind of intuitiveness and our sense of empathy for each other. It could just be that and nothing supernatural at all, but it still feels like magic. I’ve been amazed that audiences are leaving with that and pondering this idea of, “Okay, well, even if it’s artificial, is it also still real or is it also still meaningful? I don’t know if dead grandma’s in the room or not, but I do know that even though she’s gone, she’s still affecting my life, even though she’s not here.”
Look Into My Eyes opens in theaters on Friday, September 6.
The post Look Into My Eyes Director Lana Wilson on Psychic Tradition vs. Therapy, the Loneliness of NYC, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life first appeared on The Film Stage.
