On election night 2016, director Lana Wilson (“After Tiller,” “ Miss Americana ”) had been shooting all night on the Atlantic City boardwalk, capturing images of President-elect Donald Trump’s bankrupted casinos.
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“I was heartbroken, frightened, depressed, and I was waiting for my ride back to New York when I saw a sign in the distance that said ‘$5 Psychic Readings,’” said Wilson while on IndieWire’s Toolkit podcast to discuss her new A24 documentary “ Look Into My Eyes. ”
Without giving it too much thought, Wilson, who had never been to a psychic, walked in, pulled back a curtain, and found two empty chairs.
“No one was there, but I took a seat, and as soon as I sat down, I had the sensation of a flash of sudden clarity. I had the feeling of looking in a mirror at my own internal state at that moment, and all of the vulnerability I brought into that room, and I felt really emotional,” said Wilson.
After a brief, somewhat unremarkable reading, Wilson was in a car headed back to her New York City apartment. But the brief experience left a lasting impression.
“I felt comforted,” said Wilson. “I’d had this emotionally intimate moment with a complete stranger, and that felt really meaningful to me. And so I kept thinking, ‘How is it possible that I, a lifelong skeptic… feel a little better now?”
What Wilson discovered over the course of making “Look Into My Eyes” — in which she sits in on sessions with seven New York City psychics — was that the question of whether the psychics could actually see into the future or communicate with the dead was irrelevant.
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“I absolutely came in [a] full-on skeptic, and what I realized is you don’t have to believe,” said Wilson. “It’s not about literally believing or not believing what a psychic is saying. It’s so much more about the emotional experience in the room between these two people.”
The seven psychics Wilson features in the film are cut more from the therapeutic side of the practice. They are empathetic souls who want to help their clients heal, and, as the second half of the film reveals, are in need of healing themselves. Like those who believe in religion, the psychics have moments of doubt, questioning their own abilities, which is something Wilson felt was important to show in her film.
“It’s so much like a religious belief system in that you might not believe every word that a faith leader is telling you, or believe that these stories are literally true, but it’s more about what is the meaning of those stories,” said Wilson.
Being able to capture the emotional experience and how to translate that to a cinematic experience for the audience became Wilson’s focus, a series of creative choices she discussed in detail while on the Toolkit podcast. Interrogating the question of whether what she was documenting was real is something that faded into the background.
“Because in the end it’s two people in a room, let’s say they’re talking to a dead relative, what do we know: Is the dead relative literally there? What does that even mean?” said Wilson. “If two people are remembering someone together, and having – you can think of it as a performance or as real – but they’re having this mutual experience of care and remembering that is bringing this person to life in a way that they are affecting the people who are in the room, and I think that’s real in its own way.”
“Look Into My Eyes” opened last week at the Film Forum in New York City, and opens today in 100 theaters nationwide.
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