Interview: Lana Wilson on Connecting with Psychics and Audiences in ‘Look Into My Eyes’

On Election Night 2016, Lana Wilson fell into despair while on a filming assignment at a Trump property in New Jersey. As part of her search for meaning, she gravitated toward a storefront medium to calm her sense of dread. Two election cycles later, the same outcome looms as a possibility once again. But in the intervening eight years, Wilson has unpacked her initial impulse to seek solace from strangers in troubled times and reflected upon the power of the psychic reading in the documentary Look Into My Eyes.

Wilson’s film quickly moves beyond evaluating the correctness of her subjects’ clairvoyance. She instead narrows her focus on the connection that occurs during a reading between the psychics and their clients. More than people looking for answers, she finds individuals seeking connection through speaking and listening. Look Into My Eyes does expand its purview to cover more than just the sessions, including how the psychics exist individually and in community with one another. But it’s these sequences of intense, immediate presence that provide the film—as well as Wilson herself—with an animating sense of purpose.

I spoke with Wilson before the theatrical debut of Look Into My Eyes. Our conversation covered how she landed on the mirroring structure of the film, why Kore-eda Hirokazu’s After Life provided such an important aesthetic touchstone, and what parallel might exist between psychics and her recent documentary subject Taylor Swift.

You were a film curator before making your own films. What would you show alongside Look Into My Eyes if you were putting together a program? And beyond just After Life, which I know was a stylistic influence.

What’s funny is that I re-watched Ordinary People recently and realized it opens with the same shot as this film. The camera starts in the clouds and moves in the same direction across the lake to the house. It’s a little different, but I thought that was incredible. I’d show that.

My friend curated a great series a while ago at Anthology Film Archives called “Talking Head,” which is amazing because there’s a feeling sometimes in documentaries of “I don’t like talking heads, that’s conventional and boring.” But, in a way, talking heads can actually be the most radical thing because you’re breaking the fourth wall. It’s this direct confessional format and acknowledgment of the camera and filming. I couldn’t do better than my friend’s series, which is already amazing, but a series that shows how radical and interesting talking-head-centered cinema could be would be good. Maybe it was another series, but about films where people process grief. Ordinary People is like this, obviously, but I think that would be great.

I’m obsessed with intense two-person emotional exchanges. I’ve made films that are kind of in that situation. I love the central scene in Hunger between Michael Fassbender and the priest. I would make a whole series of films that are just about very intense two-person conversations like that—My Dinner with André and many minimalist movies like that.

How did you end up with those bookending shots of the film where you narrow in on a single window in New York, then expand back out from it at the end?

It was an idea I always had. It’s a deeply New York-y film to me, even though you hardly ever see New York. There are a few shots of the city, but it’s mostly inside these rooms and conversations. It’s like an inside-out New York movie. I knew I wanted this opening framing shot. I just saw it in my head as a combination of the opening shot of Psycho, which is also in the sky and then it goes into the city before it finally zooms into the window of Janet Leigh’s apartment, and the opening of Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light. I couldn’t achieve the opening shot of Silent Light, which is this four-minute-long technical masterpiece with a similar kind of movement of the camera in the sense of a place waking up. I wanted to, in the most direct way possible, establish [that there are] millions of people, millions of stories, millions of questions. We’re going into one. And I also wanted to make clear from the get-go that these weren’t storefront psychics. It was filmed from the roof of my apartment, actually, that shot.

How did you settle on the structure of the film? Did the collapse of past and present tense within these sessions present a challenge?

My previous belief was that you have to [establish] the central conflict or thesis of your film within five minutes, and the rest of the film is going to be exploring that. With this film, I wanted to do something different. In a way, the central conflict is in that first session. You meet this doctor, who’s herself a healer, who needs healing. But I really wanted to try starting with the clients and having the shape of the film expand outward in scope. The film is built around you, the audience, gradually deepening your emotional connection to the film’s landscape. I wanted it to also have this mirroring structure of starting with the client and ending with the psychic.

The initial idea was that I wanted to plunge us into the sessions, and I knew I wanted them to have this very austere, strict visual style. Then, I have this moment that happens at about 20 minutes in where suddenly you’re on a handheld camera and you’re outside, and it’s a bit shocking. Then, we’re in the psychics’ homes, and the camera is handheld and a bit messy, and the boom’s coming into the shot. The chaos of their actual lives is intruding into the movie, and all of a sudden, they’re talking to the camera. I wanted to set up two visual styles so then you’re home with the psychics for a while, and you go between them to learn about these common backgrounds they have in some ways. And then we intercut the two visual styles.

Something I don’t think I imagined at the beginning at all, but that I discovered through the process of making the film, was this comparison between the psychic and a client and the director and a subject. The reason a documentary subject agrees to be in a documentary is, I think, not that different from what might bring someone to sit in front of a psychic. Because you’re curious, and you think, “What would it mean for a complete stranger to witness me, to hold a mirror up to me, to tell me a story about what they see reflected there? Will I find that an accurate reflection or not? Will I be surprised by that or not?”

That’s why the final stretch of the film is about that curiosity, courage, and vulnerability. In the final moments of the film, there’s a little surprise that happens that, for me, is about puncturing the artifice of the film in a way and saying, “Okay, the psychic was in on it, the director was in on it. This whole thing was artificial and constructed, but it was also a real, emotional experience.” I hope the audience wants to watch the whole film again or is thinking about that question of [whether] something can be both artificial and real at the same time.

I’ve been lucky enough to watch the film twice…

Ooh! Did it feel different?

Yes! When I watched it at Sundance for the first time and without having much context, I assumed “real or make-believe” was the axis of your exploration. Obviously, that’s not the one that you’re looking at. So if that’s not the central dynamic between the psychic and their subjects, what do you now see that as?

I grew up unreligious, a skeptic my whole life, and one day I was surprised to find myself seeking comfort from a psychic. The first time I went to a psychic, I couldn’t believe I was there. My reaction to that experience was that it didn’t matter to me. It’s different for everyone, but for me, it didn’t matter if what the psychic was saying was literally true or not. But I did have this really personal, emotional experience talking to her. Any therapist would tell you an emotional experience is real for the person who’s going through it. It became about exploring that and wondering, as a lifelong skeptic going to see a psychic seeking comfort, “Millions of people around the world do this. This is a tradition that’s existed since before therapy, since before the English language…why? What’s the difference between those people seeing psychics and me?”

That’s what the film is about. What’s the difference between the people seeing psychics and the psychics themselves? That’s also what the film’s about. It’s our human need to find meaning and cope with these impossible situations and questions in life, to process these impossible things like the loss of a loved one. How do we do that? How are we there for each other to do that, whether it’s religion or a psychic reading? What’s this doing for us as people? I wanted to address and look at real/not real, but then move on to address what this does for us as humans.

You’ve summarized the needs people want fulfilled by a psychic as “someone sees us, we’re special, we have an impact on the world.” Do you see your former documentary subjects like Taylor Swift or Brooke Shields serving a similar function to validate people on a macro scale?

Having been to many Taylor Swift concerts, I can tell you there’s an unbelievable shared emotional catharsis that happens there. A lot of music concerts are a huge spiritual experience for a lot of people. I think there’s something about sharing that experience with others that’s extra-meaningful. I would compare it more to why I love seeing a movie in a theater as opposed to watching it alone. There’s something about being with strangers and having this shared emotional experience that is transformative.

On the Plain English podcast, one of Derek Thompson’s guests asked, “Is Taylor Swift a cult?” Thompson responded, “No, Taylor Swift is Christianity.” She’s a monoculture and represents a dominant belief system in which people feel welcomed and recognized. Do you see these countercurrents as something like equal and opposite reactions to people needing validation of their existence?

That’s interesting. We all want to feel not alone, that’s one thing. The experience of realizing, “Oh my god, you had the exact same experience as me,” is startling and magical when it happens, and so many people have that when they listen to a Taylor Swift song. Another thing I noticed is that music helps so many people process grief, so a lot of people come to music for comfort to get through the hardest times in their lives. You can feel like music saves you, in a way. I’m not a musicologist, and there must be many reasons for [how] so many people feel directly connected very specifically to Taylor Swift’s lyrics and the emotions in her songs.

I noticed in this film that several of the psychics, and at least one or two of them talk about this in the film, grew up in a conventional religion like Catholicism and felt restricted. For example, [they were] unable to exist as a gay person inside Catholicism and had to leave but needed something else to give solace, understanding, meaning, and this organizing template to life in the world that might not otherwise be there. I think turning to a different religious belief system is one thing, but I also think that, for some people who grew up in a more secular context like me, turning to art is another way of doing that.

How did the moment when the psychics explicitly acknowledged your presence during the reading change the film?

I was shocked when that happened! I remember I was watching on a monitor, and I almost jumped when he turned to the camera and addressed me. I knew as soon as we filmed it this was a remarkable moment, and I knew it’d be right around the midpoint of the film in terms of this pattern of when the fourth wall breaks are happening and why, and what it builds to at the end of the film. It was very startling in real life, and it’s been fun seeing this movie in a theater because that moment was quite startling also for the audience.

One cool thing happened at a screening in Warsaw where he turned to the audience at that moment and said, “Has anyone lost a young man with a skateboard? Because I’m seeing him here.” You turn to the audience and sitting in the front row in Warsaw is a young man holding a skateboard. Everyone in the theater was like, “He’s here! He’s here!” There was another screening in DC where we walked out of the theater and there was a young man just skateboarding right in front. I love that experience because part of what’s interesting about going to get a psychic reading is that sometimes these random images or things that are said may seem arbitrary or have no meaning at the time, but then you’re looking for them later.

Was making Look Into My Eyes any different than calibrating how present to make yourself in other documentaries?

I was uncomfortable with hearing my voice at all in the movie. I hate the sound of my voice. I’ve never been in my own movies. It’s not it wasn’t part of the intention of this film. In almost all of my other films, especially the verité projects, I tend toward this observational mode where I’m usually hiding in a corner. I don’t like interacting with people while I’m filming. And when I first went home with the psychics, one of them opened the door and it was almost like this was an episode of MTV’s Cribs where they were touring me around their house. I felt so uncomfortable, but it also was who they were. They’re all charming, charismatic people who have these backgrounds in theater, so they’re kind of like, “Look at this! Look at that!”

My extraordinary editor Hannah Buck really pushed me to embrace this reflexive aspect of the film, and it did end up becoming a big part of it. Even though I’m very uncomfortable being in this in any way, it was interesting that my relationship with the psychics had this parallel to their relationship with their clients. They’re in front of me, confessing all of this incredibly vulnerable stuff, and I’m there like an unlicensed therapist holding up the mirror!

An underappreciated connection between the psychic and the documentarian is the art of listening. How did this project change the way you thought about how to listen and how to capture it?

It’s rare to be deeply listened to, and it’s huge part of what they and I do. I don’t know if it changed the way I think about the art of listening, but what it did change for me is just thinking about creativity and intuition in general. I kept asking them questions about this because I often have an image of my head of a shot or something. What is that? Where is that coming from? What does that mean? I realized, “What if I just said all those images in my head out loud? Is that the same thing they’re doing?” I wondered a lot about that and found that very interesting.

What do you make of the dichotomy that when channeling something ethereal in a psychic reading, what matters most is the immediate connection with the person in the room?

That was something that really came across to me. We all believe in things we can’t see, and we tell ourselves stories about things we don’t know for sure because we have to have that faith in each other or we can’t get through our lives in the world. This whole idea of if what they’re saying is true or not true, if they’re really connecting to a dead person or not…I don’t think that matters as much as the emotional experience that’s going on between these two people who are physically, tangibly there. It’s incredibly meaningful being there and willing to go on some kind of journey or process to take people somewhere, to comfort them, to listen to them, to give them that sustained attention where no question’s too weird or too ridiculous to ask here. It doesn’t even have to be a deep question. It can be, “Will I have chickens?” From my perspective, you don’t have to believe in anything for that to still have some kind of resonance for you.

This is a documentary largely without title or name cards, historical context, and outside commentary. Is that at all an outgrowth of wanting to center these immediate sensations?

Yes, for something that deals with this kind of supernatural content, I wanted an extreme commitment to realism in the stylistic approach. There’s no music except for diegetic music, of which there’s a little bit, so it’s scoreless. No titles, no text, no full-screen archival, or anything like that. It’s all extremely realistic in the real world.

You were talking about After Life as a stylistic inspiration for how you were shooting some of the exchanges, but how much were these also structured as practical displays of empathy during the readings?

The After Life inspiration was two things. The first was the visual approach for shooting the sessions. There are these two slightly different visual styles [in Look Into My Eyes]. One is this rigid filming style for the sessions, and the other is this more chaotic style for filming the psychics at home. With the sessions, I found that having that specific shooting approach gave a feeling of neutrality, especially with the shots of the clients. I wanted people not to feel like they’re being pushed to believe or not believe. You’re in this lockdown shot where you’re watching emotions and thoughts play out in the clients’ faces, and that’s the most important composition in the film. Later, that will be mirrored in these shots of the psychics. I embraced that neutrality of perspective that brought to the sessions. That is why I embraced that.

But the other thing about After Life that was such a touchstone for me was that there’s a main character, but you don’t even know it until far into [Kore-eda’s] film. You only see a shot of this young woman who’s a counselor in this waystation between Earth and the afterlife [approximately] 20 minutes in, and you only leave the counseling rooms with her [some 10 minutes later]. I found that such a rich and unexpected viewing experience where you slowly reveal who the main character is, and so I wanted to do something like that with this film. So that was another part of the After Life inspiration, just in the overall narrative structure.

Are you thinking about the ways in which having a camera trained on someone’s face might affect the way in which they’re experiencing the moment?

I found a way of filming where the camera on the client was unmanned. No one was behind it, so they were looking at a psychic. You’ll become vaguely aware that there’s a camera lens over there, but because there’s no person there and you’re so focused on the psychic, it feels like furniture. You forget about it. There’s no one watching you. You’re only seeing the psychic. There was a second camera, also on a tripod, that was operated by my cinematographers, mostly Stephen Maing. He would be outside of the client’s eyeline, behind them a little. He was filming shots of the psychic, and the client maybe would hear a little bit of movement or sound, though the goal was to move as little as possible. I wanted him to only move three to four times during a session. I wanted to feel like there’s no glass between you and the client, in a way, and I think it’s because they didn’t see any people or anyone watching them that it feels like that.

We’ve talked about the false dichotomy between real and imaginary with your subject, and that’s also a dynamic that people like to apply to film at large. You’ve expressed interest in developing some fiction products, so will you carry anything you’ve learned from analyzing that fake binary into those projects in the future?

I see nonfiction and fiction as being on a spectrum, absolutely. My favorite documentaries have the artistry and craft of a fiction film, and my favorite fiction films have the kind of rawness and immediacy of a documentary. There’s a bit of commentary on that, especially in the last quarter of this film. You get to the end of this piece of nonfiction cinema, but it’s artificial. There’s a moment where that’s punctured. However, on the other hand, it’s also real. It’s constructed and real at the same time. I wanted to draw a comparison between that and psychic readings.

I’m working on this fiction project that I’m hoping to shoot in the spring, and it’s very much drawn from real life. I did a lot of interviews and research to learn about the specific type of situation and really get a sense of the world. Real people are so complex, but watching fiction, people often feel like stereotypes or two-dimensional. Within documentaries, people never feel that way! At least in my experience, usually. There are some documentaries where you feel like you’re being kind of force-fed a contrived version of a person. But in terms of working with material from real human beings, it’s always so rich because the complexity is infinite.

Your job as a filmmaker is to compress and decide what aspect of someone you’re looking at, why, and how that fits the theme you’re exploring. I think it’s the reverse challenge in fiction; I’m writing the script myself. You’re hitting the limits of your own imagination. It’s like a glass ceiling with the etching of your imagination in terms of what you know, what you see, and what you’ve experienced of people, relationships, and the world. You’re always running up against [it] because we don’t ever fully know another person. You’re encountering a reduced version of a person, no matter what, in your head, so that’s what’s so fascinating about it as a process to me.