Filmmaker Lana Wilson On How Psychic Visit Led Her To Make Doc 'Look Into My Eyes' | Sundance 2024
Filmmaker Lana Wilson stop by The Hollywood Reporter's studio in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival to chat about her documentary 'Look Into My Eyes.' She shares a visit to a psychic following the 2016 election led her to explore the themes in the documentary.
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00:00 Taylor Swift and Brooke Shields both experienced this huge level of global fame.
00:04 And so a lot of people are looking at them and watching them,
00:06 but very few people are really witnessing them.
00:09 So on election night 2016, I was filming for this omnibus project about the election in Atlantic
00:19 City, New Jersey. It was a night where I was filming these Trump's casinos that had gone
00:25 bankrupt there. And I thought it was an ironic portrait of them. But then as the night went on,
00:30 and as it became clear that Trump was going to win the election, it became like living in a horror
00:35 movie. It was an awful night. And when I woke up in the morning, I was devastated, in despair,
00:42 feeling terrified, sad. And I was waiting at 8am for my ride back to the city,
00:49 just standing in the strip mall in Atlantic City. And I just noticed a sign that said,
00:54 "$5 psychic readings." And without even thinking, I just walked inside, never been to a psychic
00:59 before. And I pulled back this velvet curtain, and there was a little table and two chairs.
01:04 And I sat down at the table, and no one was there. But I immediately felt incredibly emotional.
01:10 I felt like I was staring in a mirror at my own desperate, vulnerable state. And it was very
01:19 powerful. And then this psychic came in, and she gave me a reading. It was very gentle and comforting,
01:25 and I felt better at the end of it. And I paid her $5. And she said, as I was leaving, "What do you
01:31 do for a living?" I said, "Well, I'm a documentary filmmaker." She asked, "Oh, what do you make
01:34 documentaries on?" At that time, I was finishing a movie. I said, "I'm working on this movie about
01:39 a priest who counsels people considering suicide, and it really takes a toll on him."
01:44 And she said, "That sounds like my life." I was like, "What?" And she said, "Yeah, people come
01:50 here in really serious life situations with huge problems that they can't talk to anyone else about."
01:56 And I was so surprised to hear that, because I think I dismissed psychics in my head as something
02:02 you might do during a bachelorette party. I saw it as something trivial. And when this psychic
02:08 said that to me, I realized people come to see psychics at major crossroads in their lives.
02:13 And that's when I had this idea of, wouldn't psychic readings be an amazing space to get to
02:18 see this wash of humanity coming to see a psychic and get to see what questions are they asking and
02:24 why? And what is that experience like for them? One of the things I learned from making this film
02:29 is that I think psychic readings are not unlike any religious belief system, in that it's a way of
02:35 helping understand the world and process what it means to be human, to be alive, to process
02:40 loss in some cases. And I think for me, the thing that's always done that is movies and art in a
02:47 larger sense. And I think that there's a lot in common, actually, between experiencing art and
02:51 experiencing a psychic reading. I think a lot of people who will watch this will have very recently
02:58 watched Pretty Baby or Miss Americana. On your side of things, what felt most different about
03:07 making this? Well, Look Into My Eyes was much more glamorous than Miss Americana or Pretty, no.
03:13 It is a deeply unglamorous movie. There is not a lot in common in a way. But I guess, you know,
03:22 I had the idea for this film before making Miss Americana and Pretty Baby. And I'm so, so glad
03:27 I got the opportunity to make those two films and then come back to this. Because I actually think
03:33 that what I learned from those films deeply informed this. And in a way, Miss Americana
03:39 and Pretty Baby, these are two extraordinary women that are very, very different. But one
03:44 thing they both had in common is they are both watched by the world in an extreme way. A lot of
03:51 people looking at them. And I think that that's what my job was as a documentary director with
03:57 those films. I think it was to really witness them myself and then find a way to capture them
04:04 in the films that I was making. And I think that we all need witnesses sometimes to better see
04:12 ourselves. You know, it's like, it's helpful to look at yourself through the gaze of someone else
04:17 sometimes to better understand yourself. And I think that I reflected after those two films on
04:24 my entire body of work so far and what I've learned about making documentaries. And I think a big
04:28 reason that subjects might agree to participate in the documentary is because they're on this
04:34 journey of self-understanding. And they want to be understood and they want to learn more about
04:37 themselves. And it is this mirroring, reflecting process when you're the subject of a documentary
04:42 saying, "Okay, I'm going to let you hold up a mirror to me and show me what you see." And that
04:47 is what is happening in psychic reading too. Someone is coming in and sitting down in front
04:52 of a complete stranger and saying, "I'm going to let you hold up a mirror to me and tell me
04:57 what you're seeing." And it's a very vulnerable position to put yourself in, but it can be a
05:02 really powerful experience. So what I took away is that there are all these parallels between a
05:10 psychic reading and the act of documentary filmmaking. And that became something I
05:15 incorporated into the film.
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