After interviewing psychics, this director discovered a new meaning in healing powers

On a cold November morning in 2016, documentary filmmaker Lana Wilson, hazy from a night of post-election filming 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 out into the social unknown — left her shaken. She walked out with few answers about the future, but one burning question: What do the millions of people around the world who visit psychics each 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 departurefollows a punk turned Buddhist priest who dedicates himself to suicide counseling. Taylor Swift gave her unimaginable access to the making of Swift’s 2019 album Lover for the 2020 film Mrs Americawho also captured a bruised pop star desperate to use her powers to save her country. Wilson’s new film, Look into my eyesaddresses similar themes through the therapeutic agreement a psychic client enters into with a professional clairvoyant.

Wilson, a self-proclaimed skeptic with no religious ties, began making Look into my eyes to find the human element at the heart of the paranormal industry. The result is a series of sessions that have more in common with HBO’s In treatment than Long Island Average. Her film is filled with heartbreak and reward. With Look into my eyes In theaters September 6 via A24, Polygon spoke with Wilson about how she found her paranormal subjects, the cinematic approach it took to capture the readings properly, and whether Taylor Swift has the same “psychic” abilities as she does in the film.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Polygon: The psychics you speak to in Look into my eyes are real down-to-earth New Yorkers who happen to have professional contact with the dead. They also all love art. Did you see similarities between all the people you talked to, even the ones who aren’t in the film? Do they all have a recognizable creative side?

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

The main thing I was looking for was people who were really genuine. You can think that what they’re doing is real or not, whatever, but I wanted psychics who were absolutely genuine about what they were doing, and not just trying to make money by exploiting vulnerable people. No one in my film is like that. So I think I was drawn to them, firstly for that reason, and secondly because they were doing these longer, more elaborate sessions.

One of them is actually a former therapist, so it’s more at the intersection of psychotherapy, at the intersection of religious belief systems. And they were just people that I was drawn to and that had some kind of depth to them. It wasn’t until I started filming with them that I realized how much they had in common, that they were all creative people, many of them with backgrounds in theater and performance. Many of them loved movies and art.

I was still thinking something like: Do I choose people who remind me of myself, or with whom I enjoy talking about this topic? I think there’s a bit of that. I chose people who mirrored me in some way. But I also learned that many of them had a profound experience of loss and grief that shaped them, and that led them in many cases to seek out a psychic themselves. So all of those things that they had in common became the glue of the film, and allowed me to tell this collective story. I think it’s a little unexpected. It’s not just a film about psychics, it’s really about how people process pain and grief. And their personal backgrounds allowed me to do that.

You shoot these psychic sessions with such delicacy. The camerawork feels as otherworldly as the supposed gifts on display. How did you consider your filming style to avoid putting your finger on the scale?

I love that question, because I’ve thought about it a lot. The first three days of shooting were kind of doomed experiments. I thought at first that I had to really set up the sessions big. I thought that I could really play around with, like, fun lighting and all that stuff. And so I brought a bunch of gear, fancy cameras, but those sessions honestly felt like an episode of Dates around.

I was like, This is a nightmare. This is not what I want. So the next day I thought: We do the opposite, we use 5D’s (digital SLR cameras), this is portable. We’re going to film while sitting on the grass in a park at night, without lights. And there was something more alive about that footage, but there was something about the handheld documentary style of the sessions that implied too much reality, if that makes sense. I felt manipulated. Watching that footage felt like I was trying to position it as a vérité documentary. It bothered me to watch it and I didn’t understand the director’s perspective.

Then I came up with this approach which was inspired by the film by (Hirokazu Kore-eda) After life. I’ve been obsessively rewatching After lifewhere I was looking at the interplay between tripod cameras and handheld cameras in particular. So I decided to shoot the sessions entirely on a tripod, which I think implied a kind of neutrality in perspective. Like shooting on a tripod and in this specific way, where the client shot looks 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 minimalistic, but I think having the exact same visual treatment for every client brought this neutrality, so that the audience could watch it without feeling like they were being forced to believe or not believe anything. The psychic shots are a different perspective, their profiles are (shot) three-quarters, but they’re very minimalistic in the same way, spare, on tripods. That visual style is then contrasted with the more raw and tough handheld visual style of the psychics in their homes and in their chaotic, cluttered apartments.

In order to avoid the self-consciousness of people on camera, because it’s, as you say, a bit like therapy sessions, these very vulnerable exchanges, I had noticed that on the day that I was testing the handheld footage, people seemed quite self-conscious on camera, and it felt performative. And so on day three, we eventually found a way where the camera that was filming the client was unmanned, so there was no one behind it. Someone was pulling focus remotely from another room, so what the client sees is just the psychic sitting opposite them, and a little bit behind the psychic.

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

I imagine skeptics would hope for a strong interrogation of the psychic sales pitch in a film like this. That’s not the film’s modus operandi, but there are moments of self-reflection and pause. How hard did you push for answers to what was really going on here? And how did you decide in the editing what you really needed?

I got quite into it. A lot of contemporary documentaries are investigative journalism, so people might think, Oh, this is going to be a revealing investigation into psychics. I don’t make those kinds of films. I was interested in a cinematic exploration of people trying to connect with each other, to see each other 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 (psychological subject) Eugene talks a little bit in the film 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 a lot of the people in the film, that’s their experience, and that’s why it became really interesting to me, the connection to creativity.

There’s a sort of central section where I’m talking to one of the psychics, because she has a background in theater, and I’m thinking, “Well, how is this different from improv theater?” And she says, “It’s not — it’s not different. Improv artists have a psychic connection to each other.” And I thought that was really interesting, because we’re so wired as human beings to be so sensitive to each other, and to have so much empathy for each other. And the fact that our inner experiences of joy and loss are so similar — I actually think we can kind of read each other’s minds, in the sense that we have so much more in common as human beings than we do different. So I was really interested in that, but I didn’t want it to be the sole focus of the film.

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

I think one of the things that makes her such an amazing songwriter is that 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 resonates so emotionally is because they’ve had that same ultra-specific experience. The universal outcome of the most specific experience. That mirrored connection. A lot of people feel like, I understand Taylor. She understands me, even though we’ve never met. But I feel like I know her through her music, because her experiences so deeply mirror mine, in a profound and emotionally cathartic way..

The analogy with the film is that someone who comes to a psychic session is curious about what a stranger who witnesses them will see and reflect back to them. I don’t know if that really resonates with Taylor Swift fans, but I do think that the subjects of the documentary are often the reason they agree to be in the film. They are curious about what a stranger, a complete outsider, will see and reflect back to them, what it will be like to have the mirror held up to them by someone who is not just looking at them and judging them, but who is a profound witness to them.

People want to be seen and I think you can feel that, that you are really seen, when you listen to a Taylor Swift song.

Look into my eyes will be in theaters from September 6.