The night Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, filmmaker Lana Wilson was in Atlantic City capturing “darkly ironic portraits” of the Republican candidate’s bankrupted casinos. The mood became more surreal as the election results began to roll in, she says, and she woke up the next morning “feeling devastated, depressed and confused.” As she waited for her ride back to New York City, she spotted a sign advertising $5 psychic readings. Without giving it much thought, she walked right in.
By Sonia Rao
Wilson doesn’t remember what the psychic told her that day. But eight years later, she does remember how the reading made her feel. She recalls tearing up as she looked into a mirror before the psychic even appeared, stunned by the forces that had brought her there. She described to the woman a documentary she was working on, about a Zen priest who absorbed the pain of the suicidal people he counseled, and the woman responded that it sounded a lot like her own psychic readings.
“It wasn’t about believing or not believing in anything this woman said,” Wilson says. “It was that I felt comforted by what she said in those five minutes. I had not an experience of belief but an experience of emotional connection with this stranger, where I left feeling a bit like a weight had been lifted off of me.”
The documentary “Look Into My Eyes,” in theaters nationwide Friday, explores why people turn to the spiritual realm in moments of crisis. The clients include, among many others, a new parent still mourning the years-old loss of his brother, an adoptee wondering why her parents gave her away and an elderly dog owner who frets over her pet refusing to walk with a leash. “I’m a court of last resort,” Wilson recalls the woman in Atlantic City saying to her. But the film goes a step further when it turns the camera to point at the other side of the table, examining the motivations of the psychics themselves. It turns out they, like many of their clients, have their own stories of grief.
Wilson has directed an array of documentaries, including the popular Netflix film “Miss Americana,” about pop star Taylor Swift. But “Look Into My Eyes,” which received positive reviews at the Sundance Film Festival this year, is her first to involve so many subjects. She assembled a team in 2020 to receive around 150 readings from psychics across all five New York boroughs and whittled the list down to a handful by determining which were the most “sincere about what they were doing.” The film follows these psychics as distressed clients open up to them — all in the context of a global pandemic.
“I’d never done something so demanding,” Wilson says of the filmmaking process.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
How did you determine the focus of this film?
I really became convinced that “Is it real or not?” is not the point here. I started to feel like this has so much more in common with other religious belief systems. You’re being told stories about things that you’re expected to believe in, even though they can’t be proven. You’re told stories of things that you can’t see. The point of a lot of religions and faiths and spirituality in general is not necessarily that this is a provable path of what happens in the afterlife, but what gives us meaning in our lives here.
Why limit the scope of the story to New York City?
I’ve been in New York City for 20 years, and I was here during the whole pandemic. … I was so struck by how — like most other places on Earth — there was a feeling of loneliness and isolation. Everyone was more anxious about the future than ever. It was traumatic. It was incredibly unsettling. But there was also this appreciation of the preciousness of human connection more than ever before.
It’s a city where it’s okay to be lonely. It’s accepted. It’s not something to hide from or avoid. … The people I was drawn to cast as the central focus of the film, not only did they have this sincerity, not only did they have a willingness to openly explore their own doubts about this work — whether it was real or not, and whether they were helping people or not — but many of them also turned out to be creative people. Artists, actors, writers. They were all hustling and had day jobs. They’re not making much money from the psychic work. And I thought that was such a New York-y thing, too.
How much thought did you put into the diversity of the psychics presented? One of them is a pet psychic, which I did not expect going in but found fascinating.
I looked for people who did longer, deep-dive sessions, not the five-minute storefront psychic readings I was describing. … I found those richer for me to witness and work with as a filmmaker.
I had no idea that pet psychics existed. … One thing I learned from watching Phoebe’s readings is that pets, because they cannot speak, are a projection of ourselves. They’re a mirror for us, in the same way psychic readings often hold a mirror up to the client. And that’s what I do as a filmmaker, too.
How did you negotiate access with the clients? These moments are quite intimate.
I found it inaccessible as a viewer if the psychic and the person already knew each other. I decided to try to find clients myself, in a similar way to how I found the psychics: by going to all five boroughs and hitting the pavement. I put together a team of production assistants who … set up tables at places where people gathered during the pandemic — outside grocery stories, in parks and farmers markets, places like that. And they would be sitting at tables with signs that said “free psychic readings.”
If you’ve ever tried to cast for a documentary … you only attract aspiring actors. It’s kind of funny that with the psychics, I did end up getting a bunch of aspiring actors, anyway.
Was there ever a question of whether you, as a documentary filmmaker, wanted to be involved in the process of finding clients for your subjects?
Basically none of these psychics are seeing, like, five people a day. I think they’re seeing, on average, one person every two weeks. They have other jobs and artistic creative pursuits. So it was simply a matter of, “I want to film a day of readings rather than film this documentary over 10 years.”
The other part of it is that I liked the idea of surprising the psychics with who these people were. Some interesting things came out of that, too. There’s a session toward the end of the film where a psychic’s former acting school classmate comes in. The woman lost her friend to suicide, and the psychic also knew that person. A client had actually canceled last minute — we had an hour and nothing to film, so my camera assistant was like: “You know, I have a friend who lives around the corner. She seems like the kind of person who’d be into this sort of thing. Should I call her?” That’s who that was.
Aside from the covid aspect, were there any filmmaking challenges you didn’t foresee?
The biggest surprise to me was how much this film is about the psychics themselves. I wanted it to start with the clients and end with the psychics because I wanted this table-turning, mirroring effect. I was excited about taking a different narrative approach than I’ve taken in any film before.
A huge touchstone for me was “After Life,” a Japanese film from the late ’90s where all these newly dead people are in a way station between earth and the afterlife. They’re sitting at these tables, and they’re given the chance to name one memory they want to take with them to the afterlife. What’s so cool about this movie is that you don’t even realize there’s a main character in the film until 30 minutes in. You don’t even see a shot of the main character alone until 18 minutes in.
As a director, my biggest role is to be an emotional barometer. I’m a stand-in for the audience. And it’s hard because I know all these people in real life — I’m not a real fresh set of eyes, but I have to try to be, every time I watch.
What did working on this film reveal to you about yourself?
I think it reveals our deeply human need to be witnessed by strangers in order to better see ourselves. Bringing clients to see the psychics was not unlike why documentary subjects agree to be in a film that I’m making. They’re coming to a complete stranger in all of their vulnerability and fragility, and they’re taking a big risk, saying: “I want you to hold a mirror up to me and to tell me a story about what you see. And I don’t know how I’m going to feel about what I see reflected there.” There’s something meaningful about being told that story by an outsider, by a total stranger. We all form our gaze in part through the ways others see us. It really affects our stories about our identities and our lives.
