Inside the Fascinating World of New York City Psychics

Lana Wilson sees a lot of similarities between making a documentary about Taylor Swift and a documentary about psychics. “We all want to be understood—it’s very easy to watch people and to look at them and to judge them, but to really witness someone is unique,” the Miss Americana filmmaker says. “It’s what I get to do as a filmmaker a lot of the time.” Watching her poignant new film Look Into My Eyes, premiering next week at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s easy to see the connection play out. Wilson makes movies with uncommon intimacy, paving cinematic paths of self-actualization. How natural, then, that she’d look to the world of psychics for her next topic.

Look Into My Eyes, which has been in the works for more than seven years, also signals an exciting step forward for Wilson, as she expands her gaze toward an entire community. Crafted as a unique portrait of contemporary New York, the doc bounces from apartment to apartment, park bench to park bench, and holds the camera on groups of people desperately seeking answers about themselves—both clients hoping to connect with what they’ve lost, and psychics grappling with loneliness and grief themselves. As Wilson follows seven unique, rigorous psychics across the city, she gains fascinating insights into why they’re suited to this work, how their personal experiences inform their approach to readings, and exactly what their lives look like. The final shot both literalizes the movie’s title and rather heartbreakingly demonstrates the power of a little person-to-person connection.

Does the film come to any answers about whether the psychics really do connect with the other side? As Wilson explains in a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair, that question is very much beside the point.

Vanity Fair: What made you want to make this movie? Where did it start?

Lana Wilson: It’s been a long time. I’ve actually never worked on a movie this long. The idea came the day after Trump was elected in 2016. It was the morning after the election, and I was working as a TV writer, so I was waiting for my ride to go back into the city. It was like 8:00 AM and I was just feeling so devastated, heartbroken, grieving. I noticed this sign in the strip mall where I was standing, it said, “$5 psychic reading.” Without even thinking, I walked in. Never been to a psychic before. I pulled back this curtain and the room was empty. There was just a table and two chairs, but no one was there. I sat down and I immediately felt very emotional. I really felt like I was looking in a mirror at my desperation at that moment. And it was very powerful. And then, this woman came in. She gave me a reading. She was very comforting and kind. I don’t remember what she said, but I remember it was brief, but that I felt better afterwards. And I paid her five bucks.

As I was leaving, she was like, “What do you do for a living?” And I said, “I’m a documentary filmmaker.” She said, “Oh, what are you making movies about?” And I said, “Well, I’m finishing this one about a punk rocker turned Zen priest who tries to convince people who are suicidal to keep on living, but he kind of destroys him in a way.” And she was like, “Sounds like my life.” I was like, “What?” And she said, “Yeah, you wouldn’t believe the situations people come in here with. People come at these real crossroads in their lives.” That was the light bulb moment for me. I never would’ve expected that of a psychic. I didn’t know how serious and profound it could be.

You follow a group of psychics in their lives. How did you build that network?

It was when the pandemic began when I started to think maybe this is the moment to make the psychics movie that I had in the back of my mind for so long. It was coming from this very powerful place of being in New York during the pandemic—it was a scary place to be, of course, but then, it was quickly an amazing place to be because people were really there for each other. It was just incredible. I thought, probably, psychics’ business is going up, and I’m sure we’re less certain about the future than ever. During the pandemic, I started meeting psychics. We saw over 100 psychics as a [production] group. Eventually, maybe it was like four people total, five people total getting readings.

We started out with the idea of maybe this would be storefront psychics, but I quickly gravitated towards people who do these longer sessions that are more at the intersection of psychotherapy. I just loved the long, deep sessions. The short ones felt more like someone reading a weather report; I loved what could be possible for an hour and a half. At the beginning, I thought, Maybe it’ll only be sessions, this kaleidoscope of humanity in New York during the pandemic. But as I got to know the psychics better, I became more and more curious about them. I learned about their own origin stories with being a psychic, which often began with them being a psychic’s client and having their life changed in some way—I realized they had a lot of shared experiences of loss and loneliness, and that I wanted more of that in the film. It became this kind of collective story of these seven psychics. There’s much more of the psychics in the film than I ever would’ve anticipated starting out.

In the edit, you can see the way that their perspectives and their experiences are informing these sessions—and maybe even the way they’re understanding the people that they’re working with.