Are Psychics Real? New Doc 'Look Into My Eyes' Says It's Complicated

Documentary filmmaker Lana Wilson says she considered herself a "lifelong skeptic." Her experience working on "Look Into My Eyes" changed that.

"Look Into My Eyes" spotlights seven people who work as psychic mediums in New York. The cameras film in-depth readings with clients, but also follow them back home, where they share their own stories.

Wilson, who also created the Taylor Swift documentary "Miss Americana " and the two-part Brooke Shields documentary "Pretty Baby ," says the idea came to her the night after the U.S. presidential election in 2016. She walked by a sign for $5 psychic readings. Despite never having been to a psychic before, she stepped inside.

"No one was there. I sat down in one of the chairs and I immediately felt really emotional. I had this sensation of almost like I was looking in a mirror at my own internal state at that moment. That feeling really stayed with me, how powerful that was," she says.

The psychic eventually gave her a "comforting" reading, leading to a breakthrough. "I started to think, well, what's the difference between me and the millions of people around the world who get psychic readings every year? And that's what this film is about," she says.

As she followed the documentary's subjects, Wilson started to think of a reading as an "emotional experience," rather than a prediction.

"This isn't about believing or not believing as much as it is about having an emotional experience that is powerful or affects you in some way. That's what's really meaningful, that it helps you understand your life or the world a little differently," she says.

How did you select the psychics featured in the film? I visited over 150 different psychics to land on the seven people in this film. And there are lots of different types of psychics. There are storefront psychics in New York City. There are celebrity psychics that go on talk shows.

I picked this group of seven because I gravitated towards them myself. They're not disingenuous at all about what they do. They're sincere.

Many of them had these formative experiences with loss themselves, and that led me to this much bigger realization about psychic readings, which are their way of processing grief and pain. I think that human beings have different ways of doing that. Some of us might turn to religion. Some of us might go to therapy. Some of us might talk to a friend. Some might go to a movie theater to process our pain. Some people go to psychic readings.

All of them were once clients, and the reason they're psychics now is that, at some key moment in their life, this work really helped them, and so they started to do it to try to help other people.

Why focus specifically on New York? I was in New York for the whole pandemic, and it was a couple months into the lockdown that I started to think, now is the moment to make that film about psychics that I've always been thinking of. Because we're at this moment where we're literally more isolated than ever, we're more anxious about the future than ever, but we're also feeling the preciousness of in-person, human connection more than ever.

I think that the movie became kind of a love letter to New York, in a way, and that you meet all these different types of people (here). The psychics themselves are deeply New York people. Their love of art and their willingness to be there for strangers, reflect aspects of this city. And also their loneliness. This is a city where there is a lot of loneliness, but I think it's also acceptable to be lonely.

Has creating this film impacted your opinion on the psychic community? To me, this isn't about believing in anything. I tried to make the film in a way so that you can believe, you cannot believe. It doesn't matter. This is about a gradually deepening emotional connection to what's going on, and (viewers) having their own emotionally rich experience with the film.

There's a discussion, especially in the final third of the film, about loss and death and grief. One of the things I think most captured this to me was how when someone dies, they're gone, and they're not gone. Regardless of your personal beliefs about the afterlife, they're still here and they're still in our memories, and they're still affecting us. We still have a relationship with the person who's gone, even though they're not here anymore. I think both of those things can be true at once.

That's how I ultimately came to feel about psychic readings. It's not about just believing or not believing. Can the connection you're making with this person and the emotional experience that you're having — can that itself be real and be meaningful, regardless of whether or not there is an afterlife? That exchange and that experience is what's real and meaningful.

While filming, did it ever occur to you that you could have psychic abilities? It did not occur to me that I could be a psychic, but I did start to realize halfway through the film this is what I'm doing as a director. I'm being intuitive. I see an image in my head and I follow it, or I try to create it. I hear words in my head. I try to find them or put them in a film.

I started to enjoy these parallels that I noticed between me as a documentary filmmaker and what psychics are doing with their clients. When I would talk to the psychics on their own, I would sometimes think, "Did I just ask the question that they just asked with their sessions?"

Strangers are coming to them and are being totally vulnerable That's how it is with me and documentary subjects over my whole career. People share all this stuff with me. We're complete strangers to each other, yet the documentary subjects have the courage to be vulnerable with me. Sometimes they haven't told it to anyone else. They're doing it, I think, because they have a curiosity to say, "Hey, Lana is going to hold up a mirror to me and tell me a story about what she sees reflected there. I wonder what that's going to be."

I think we all have a little bit of that curiosity. We know that if we go to a stranger and say, "Look at me deeply, witness me, tell me a story about what you see there," that can be really interesting and meaningful. You don't have to fully agree with them, but it can be this kind of tool for self reflection and self understanding.

What's been the biggest takeaway of stepping into this community? We all crave someone to reflect back to us. Who are you? What do you see? What is going on here? That helps us understand better, regardless of if we agree with the person or not.