How to change your mind about psychics

Back in 2016, director Lana Wilson was at her wits’ end. Trump had just been elected, and she was fresh off the back of a sleepless night shooting in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Waiting for a ride back to New York and feeling a sickly mixture of fear, depression and general heartbreak, a flashing neon sign, slapped on the front of a strip mall, caught her eye: “$5 psychic readings”.

“Without even thinking, having never been to a psychic before, I just walked in,” Lana says. ​“I sat down before anyone even came to greet me, and I felt this flash of clarity. I had the sensation of looking in the mirror at my own internal state. It felt incredibly clarifying.”

Then the psychic came in. Even before she had a chance to give Lana a reading about the innermost workings of her life, the filmmaker had a flash of feeling.

“I felt really comforted by her,” she continues. ​“It was less, you know, did I believe what she was saying, and more that I felt emotionally soothed by her presence, by her being so gentle and kind to me.” Lana could see her future, in more ways than one.

Fast forward eight years and she has made an entire film on the subject of psychics in New York. Look Into My Eyes is a compassionate, incisive documentary that lures you in with the promise of lifting the lid on an often-maligned practice, before deftly turning viewers’ attention to our collective longing for human connection – and the lengths we’ll go to in order to get it.

On that woeful day at the strip mall, Lana was busy wrapping up The Departure, a doc about a punk-turned-Buddhist priest who tries to help suicidal people to find meaning in their lives. She told the psychic about it. ​“And she said, that sounds like my life. You wouldn’t believe the situations people come in here with – they come in at a real crossroads.

“That’s when I realised I had dismissed the idea of psychic readings as something kind of silly and trivial and superficial. I had not really understood that it’s a place, whether you believe in them or not, where very serious discussions are had, and where people who have nowhere else to go turn to. That’s when I had the idea for the film.”

Before Lana really had a chance to dig into Look Into My Eyes, however, her attention was turned, er, elsewhere: namely towards Miss Americana, the intimate, acclaimed documentary about Taylor Swift which came out in 2020. And then… cue the pandemic.

“I was in New York City for the entire thing, and I felt that New Yorkers were really there for each other,” she says of experiencing Covid in a city that suffered more than most. ​“There was so much loneliness, uncertainty… The preciousness of that human connection felt so important. And so that’s when I started to make it.”

Hi, Lana! You speak to lots of psychics in Look Into My Eyes. What kind of qualities were you looking for while casting?

Sincerity. You could believe or not believe that what they’re saying is true, but they themselves had to be sincere. There are certainly people who work as psychics, and are doing it to make as much money as possible, bullshitting their way through it. I needed to find people who were committed, but also willing to be open about their own doubts about the work. People who could explore these ideas around what’s the difference between imagination and intuition. A lot of the film is so much about how it’s not simply this dichotomy of real or unreal, but actually how there are many layers to reality.

Could you unpack that for us?

I have a friend who’s a therapist who would say, you can be having a conflict, for example. With self-awareness, you could say: that’s not real, that didn’t happen. But the truth is, if the person you’re in conflict with is hurt or upset, the emotional experience is real for them. And that is a different type of reality. I also think our dreams are a different type of reality. It’s not literal reality, but it’s full and it affects people. So I wanted to find subjects who could engage in those ideas with me openly. As I made the film, though, I increasingly felt that psychic readings have more in common with religious belief systems than with therapy.

Did anything surprise you along the way?

As I got to know the psychics, and as I filmed with them outside of the readings, they began opening up to me and sharing all of their pain and vulnerability, their experiences with loss. That helped me understand the psychic readings differently. I now saw them as a two-way experience of processing these difficult aspects of being human – largely loss, but not just of people. Loss of dreams, ambition and hope, too.

Did you learn anything about yourself over the course of making this film?

Generally, I make films about people who are strangers to me. When I start filming with them, they open up, sit down and share all of their vulnerability and humanity with me. I often wonder: why would someone agree to this? It’s scary. That is what I’m doing all the time, and that’s exactly what the psychics are doing too. I was really struck by that parallel, and it became a subtle thread in the film.

You’re always trying to excavate a sense of humanity in your work – from Miss Americana to Pretty Baby, your documentary about Brooke Shields. Has this realisation changed your approach to filmmaking?

No. My approach is always intuitive. I can only make films on subjects that I feel drawn to. The film has to feel urgent to me, that feels rich and like I can spend years with it. My first film [After Tiller, 2013] was about abortion providers, and it was named after George Tiller, who was assassinated. He said something in the beginning of the film, that he would rather have a short life that has a lot of meaning, rather than a long life where he’s not really affecting anyone in a positive way. In my second film, The Departure [2017], the priest [that is the subject of the movie] says the exact same thing. Look Into My Eyes is ultimately about how we need witnesses in order to better be ourselves. We need strangers making observations about us, because we cannot see ourselves completely and clearly at all.

What do you hope people will get out of watching Look Into My Eyes?

One of my big takeaways, and a question that I hope audiences are asking themselves at the end of the film is: can something be both artificial and real at the same time, or constructed and meaningful at the same time? Because I think that psychic readings are like that. Art is like that. The experience of watching a movie in theatres is like that. Religious belief systems are like that, where it’s not so much about whether this literally true or not, but more about, how does believing in this affect me here on Earth?

Did you come away believing psychics could actually deliver messages from the dead?

Everyone has different beliefs about the afterlife and what happens when we die. I really wanted to make a film that gave the audience space to have their own personal beliefs about that. So you could look at some of the scenes in the film and think, oh, they’re definitely connecting to a ghost. Or you might think, no, no one’s there. But what we can all agree on is that there are two living people in front of us who are having a shared connection. Or you can think of it as a collaborative performance of remembering and caring for someone who’s gone. And I think that that, in itself, is meaningful.

Look Into My Eyes had its UK premiere at the 68^th BFI London Film Festival and will be released in cinemas at a later date.