An investigation into psychics made Look Into My Eyes director Lana Wilson a different kind of believer

On a chilly November morning in 2016, documentarian Lana Wilson, bleary from a night of filming post-election coverage in Atlantic City, walked into a store lit with a single neon sign: “$5 Psychic Reading.” The experience — two strangers, together in a small room, staring down the societal unknown — left her shook. She walked out with few answers about the future, but one burning question: What do the millions of people around the world who go to psychics every year get out of it?

Wilson is drawn to forms of healing. Her 2013 film After Tiller chronicles the careers of third-trimester abortion doctors. In 2017’s The Departure, she follows a punk turned Buddhist priest devoted to suicide counseling. Taylor Swift granted her unimaginable access to the making of Swift’s 2019 album Lover for the 2020 film Miss Americana, which also captured a bruised pop star desperate to use her powers to fix her country. Wilson’s new film, Look Into My Eyes, deals with similar themes through the therapeutic bargain a psychic patron makes with a professional clairvoyant.

A self-professed skeptic with no religious ties, Wilson embarked on the making of Look Into My Eyes to find the human elements at the heart of the psychic industry. The result is a series of sessions that have more in common with HBO’s In Treatment than Long Island Medium. Her film is full of heartbreak and reward. With Look Into My Eyes out in theaters courtesy of A24 on Sept. 6, Polygon spoke to Wilson about how she found her psychic subjects, the cinematic touch needed to properly capture the readings, and whether Taylor Swift possesses some of the same “psychic” abilities on display in the film.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Polygon: The psychics you speak to in Look Into My Eyes are real down-to-earth New Yorkers who happen to connect with the dead professionally. They also all love art. Did you find a similarity between all the people you talked to, even the ones who aren’t in the film? Do they all possess a discernible creative side?

Lana Wilson: I started out meeting a lot of storefront psychics, and I would say that is, from my perspective, a very different thing. So I have no idea if a lot of the storefronts I met, if they’re creative people or not. But those sessions were very quick and dry, very like, “You will be the mother to twins.” “You will move to Los Angeles.” You pay a certain amount by the minute, so there’s a lot more potential there for financial exploitation. There was even one storefront psychic I was going to film with, but they wanted thousands of dollars at the last minute before filming.

The main thing I was looking for was people who are truly sincere. You can think that what they’re doing is real or not real, whatever, but I wanted psychics who were absolutely sincere about what they did, and not just trying to make money by exploiting vulnerable people. No one in my film is like that. So I think I gravitated toward them, first for that reason, second because they were doing these longer, more expansive sessions.

One of them is actually a former therapist, so it’s more at the intersection of psychotherapy, at the intersection with religious belief systems. And it was just people who I was drawn to and who had a kind of depth. Only once I started filming with them did I realize how much they had in common, that they were all creative people, many of them with backgrounds in theater and performance. A lot of them loved movies and art. 

I still kind of thought, Am I picking people just to remind me of myself, or who I like to talk to about this stuff? I think there is a little bit of that there, too. I was picking people who reflected me in them in some ways. But then also, I learned that many of them had a profound experience with loss and grief that shaped them, and that in many cases led them to seek out a psychic themselves. So all of those things that they had in common became the kind of glue of the film, and enabled me to tell this collective story. I think it’s kind of unexpected. It’s not just a movie about psychics, it’s actually about how humans process pain and grief. And their personal backgrounds allowed me to do that. 

You photograph these psychic sessions with such delicacy. The camerawork feels as supernatural as the so-called abilities on display. How did you consider your filming style to avoid putting your finger on the scale?

I love that question, because I thought a lot about this. The first three days of shooting were kind of doomed experiments. I at first thought to really set up the sessions in a big way. I thought I could really play with, like, fun lighting and all that stuff. And so I brought in a ton of equipment, fancy cameras, but those sessions honestly looked like an episode of Dating Around. 

I was like, This is a nightmare. This is not what I want. So, the next day, I was just like, We’re going the opposite, we’re using 5Ds [digital SLRs], this is handheld. We’re gonna film sitting on the grass in a park at night, no lights. And there was something more alive about that footage, but there was something about the handheld documentary style in the sessions implying too much realness, if that makes sense. I felt manipulated. Watching that footage felt like trying to position it as a vérité documentary. It bothered me watching it, and I didn’t understand the director’s perspective. 

So then I came up with this approach that was inspired by [Hirokazu Kore-eda’s] film After Life. I obsessively rewatched After Life, looking especially at the interplay between cameras on tripods and handheld cameras. So I decided to try filming the sessions entirely on tripod, which I think allowed a kind of neutrality to be implied in the perspective. Like, filming it on tripod and in this particular way, where the client shot is like my Zoom screen right now — where it’s flat, it’s centered, and it’s the exact same composition for every single client.

It’s very minimalist, but I think having exactly the same visual treatment for every client brought this neutrality, so that audiences could watch it and not feel like they’re being pushed to believe or to not believe anything. The shots of the psychic are a different perspective, their profiles are [shot] three-quarters, but they’re similarly very minimalist, austere, on tripods. That visual style is then contrasted to the more rough-and-tumble handheld visual style of the psychics at home and in their chaotic, overflowing apartments. 

To avoid the self-consciousness of people on camera, since as you say, they’re a little bit like therapy sessions, these very vulnerable exchanges, I had noticed that on the day that I tested out the handheld footage, people did seem pretty self-conscious on camera, and it felt performative. And so on day three, we ultimately ended up finding a way where the camera filming the client was unmanned, so no one was behind it. Someone was remotely pulling focus from another room, so what the client is seeing is only the psychic sitting across from them, and a little bit behind the psychic.

There is a camera on a tripod, but because no one’s there, you just forget about it pretty quickly — it becomes more like furniture. And because it’s also an intense exchange with the psychic, you’re so focused on looking at them. I think you can see that in the shots of the clients, too. 

I can imagine skeptics hoping to see a strong interrogation of the psychic sales pitch in a film like this. That isn’t the MO of the movie, but there are moments of self-reflection and pause. How hard did you push to get answers on what’s really going on here? And in the edit, how did you decide what you really needed?

I did get pretty into it. A lot of contemporary documentaries are investigative journalism, so people could think, Oh, this is gonna be an investigative exposé of psychics. I don’t do those kinds of films. I was interested in a cinematic exploration of human beings trying their best to connect with, witness, and heal each other, and what psychic sessions mean to people. Not just “Are they real or not?” but “What do they mean, and what is the emotional impact that they have?”

I think [psychic subject] Eugene talks a little bit in the movie about how it reminds him of a creative process of writing, where he sees things — strange images, sounds — and he describes what he sees. I think that a lot of the people in the film, that’s their experience, and that’s why it became very interesting to me, the connection to creativity.

There’s this kind of central section where I’m talking to one of the psychics, because of her theater background, and I’m like, “Well, how is this different than improv theater?” And she’s like, “It’s not — it’s not different. Improv performers have a psychic connection with each other.” I found that very interesting, because we as humans are hardwired to be so sensitive to each other, and to have so much empathy toward each other. And the fact that our internal experiences of joy and loss are so similar — I actually think we can read each other’s minds a little bit, in that we as humans have so much more in common than we do different from [each other]. So I was very interested in that, but I didn’t want it to be the sole focus of the film. 

You spent a significant amount of time with Taylor Swift during the filming of Miss Americana. As a Swift expert: Do you think her relationship to her audience, how she seems to strike a deep chord for certain people, has anything in common with what these psychics provide to individuals more directly? Could a relationship to art be akin to a “psychic” relationship?

I think that one of the things that makes her such a great songwriter is, she can write these very, very specific songs, and people can listen to them, and despite how specific they are to her, they think the reason the song is so emotionally resonant is because they have had that same ultra-specific experience themselves. The universal coming out of the most specific experience. That mirroring connection. A lot of people feel like, I understand Taylor. She understands me, even though we haven’t met before. But I feel like I know her through her music, because her experiences reflect mine so deeply, in this profound and emotionally cathartic way. 

The comparison to the film is, someone coming to a psychic session is curious about what a stranger witnessing them will see and reflect. I don’t know if that really connects to Taylor Swift’s fans at all, but I do think that with the documentary’s subjects, that’s often why they are agreeing to participate in the film. They’re curious what a stranger, a total outsider, will see and reflect to them, what it will be like if the mirror is held up to them by someone who’s not just looking at them and judging them, but who’s deeply witnessing them. 

People want to be seen.

People want to be seen, and I think that’s something someone can feel, like they’re deeply seen, when they listen to a Taylor Swift song.

Look Into My Eyes opens in theaters on Sept. 6.