“As Authentic as Any Psychic Interaction Can Be”: Lana Wilson on ‘Look Into My Eyes’

A revelatory portrait of psychics and their clients, Lana Wilson’s Look Into My Eyes is also an unexpectedly poignant love letter to the myriad artists and performers that fake it till they make it in NYC—as well as to the city itself. Birthed during the pandemic that took a particularly heavy toll across the five boroughs, the doc follows a group of psychics who are all movie-fluent performers who similarly view their low-paying, psychic side gigs as more a calling than a job. Wilson, along with her much-in-demand DP Stephen Maing (whose own Union, co-directed with Brett Story, premiered over the weekend at Sundance) takes us from readings with clients (selected by the filmmaking team from table auditions) in barebones rooms (sets likewise provided by Wilson and her crew), to the psychics’ actual apartments (it’s not hoarding, it’s NYC). In the process, we learn less about predicting the future and more about connecting in the present. As Wilson herself puts it, whether ESP is “real” might just be beside the point. A few days prior to the film’s January 22 premiere at Sundance, Documentary was fortunate to catch up with the busy director, whose impressively eclectic oeuvre ranges from 2013’s Emmy Award-winning After Tiller (co-directed with Martha Shane) and 2017’s Independent Spirit Award-nominated The Departure, to the celebrity-centric studies of 2020’s Miss Americana and last year’s Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.