Allison Stewart (2:45)

Thank you so much for having me, Allison.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (2:47)

Listeners, we want to hear from you. This is a judgment free zone. By the way, have you seen a psychic? How would you describe your experience? What did you want from the experience? Tell us your story. Give us a call. 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC our social media is @olivet nyc. Or if you're someone who works as a psych or a medium, maybe part time, maybe full pot, full Time. How did you get into the profession? Give us a call. 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. Once again, this is a judgment free zone. You went to a psychic?

Allison Stewart (3:24)

Yeah.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (3:24)

That was your original idea for the film. What prompted you to see a psychic?

Allison Stewart (3:29)

So it was the morning after the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump had had just been elected president. And I was distressed, I was heartbroken, I felt lost. And I was, you know, lifelong skeptic, never considered going to a psychic before. But that morning I was feeling all of these feelings, uncertain of what to do with myself. And I was standing by a strip mall and saw a sign that said, $5 psychic reading. And without even thinking, I just walked in and I pulled back a curtain. In this little shop, there was a table and two chairs. No one was there, but I sat down in one of the chairs and I immediately had the sensation of looking in a mirror. Like I had this flash of clarity about my own internal vulnerable state at that moment. And I felt really emotional, like I was seeing myself clearly for a second. And I felt so emotional, I kept thinking, this is crazy. No one's even here. And after that, this psychic came in and she gave me a five minute reading. And, you know, I don't remember the specifics of what she said, but I do remember that it. I wasn't thinking about do I believe this woman or not, but I was rather thinking about how I felt and what the emotional experience was than. And I felt comforted by her. And I was fascinated by that.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (4:47)

That's sort of the Maya Angelou theme, not people won't remember what you said. It's how they made you feel.

Allison Stewart (4:51)

Yeah, absolutely.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (4:52)

So just for the sake of this conversation, do the people you spoke to prefer psychic? Do they prefer medium? Do they prefer spiritual guides? What are they like?

Allison Stewart (5:01)

They use all different kinds of terms. We can use psychic for this conversation. It's fine.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (5:05)

So what questions did you want to answer in your film? That's what documentary filmmakers do. They come with questions.

Allison Stewart (5:10)

Yeah, yeah. Well, one of the biggest questions I had was even if I came into this not believing in psychics, being a skeptic, yet I felt comforted and I had this emotional experience that was very powerful for me. So one question I had was, can something be both constructed and real? You know, do you have to believe in something for it to have a real emotional impact on you? Another question I had was, is this performance, is this authentic? What's the difference between the two? Can performance Also be authentic. That was another question. And then I definitely also wondered simply, what are the questions people are asking in these private rooms, in these intimate spaces? What are the psychics answering them with? And I finally wondered, how do you become a psychic and why? What draws people to this universe?

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (6:00)

You chose seven psychics that are featured in the film. What qualities were you looking for when you were looking for your subjects? Because they're really quite different.

Allison Stewart (6:08)

Yeah. I started out visiting storefront psychics, and then I quickly moved away from that, and I became drawn towards a group of people who operates more at the intersection with therapy. I would say they're doing like hour, hour and a half, long, deep dive sessions. One of them is actually a former therapist professionally. But I was drawn to people who all of them are deeply sincere about what they do. So there are certainly psychics out there who I think are just trying to make as much money as possible and are conning people out of money. And these psychics in my film, the seven people, you can agree or disagree about whether or not they're actually accessing the afterlife or not. And I welcome all different opinions on that from audience members. But one thing they have in common is that they're committed, sincere about how they approach this work. And another thing is that they all had a personal depth to them. Sometimes you meet someone and you just think, there's something about this person. I wonder what it is. And over time, as I got to know them, I came to learn that many of them had some formative experience with loss or with trauma, some kind of grief that they were still processing that brought them to the psychic world in the first place. And, you know, another thing that drew me to this group is that they're simply people I enjoyed being around. They all loved movies and art and books. It turned out many of them had backgrounds in theater or as performers, as creative people. And so that's another thing that drew me to this. This particular group. Let's take a couple of calls.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (7:46)

Kirsten is calling in, or Kristen is calling in from Hastings on Hudson. Hi, Kristen.

Caller Kristen (7:52)

Hi, Alison. I'm calling to tell you about an experience that my mom had with a psychic back in the late 80s. My mother had sort of like the equivalent of a Tupperware party where she invited a psychic to come over that she had heard about. And a bunch of her friends, they sat around having drinks. Each friend went in to meet with the psychic, and each one came out with funny stories about something about their future. The end of the evening, my mother went in Last. And she was sitting with a psychic who was telling her all about, you know, her future. And at the end my mother said, well, it's very interesting, but you haven't mentioned my husband at all. Why is that? And the psychic looked down and then looked up at my mother and said, because I don't see him in your future. And my father went on to pass away a few months later.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (8:44)

Wow, that's a spooky story, Kristin.

Allison Stewart (8:46)

Thank you for sharing it.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (8:48)

Let's talk to Rose. Hi, Rose, thanks for calling, all of it.

Caller Rose (8:52)

Hi, Allison, thank you for taking my call.

Allison Stewart (8:55)

Let's hear your story.

Caller Rose (8:58)

My sister got married at 23 years old and was back in 1998 and he was diagnosed with cancer and passed away four months later. Yes, yes, I'm sorry, I get emotional thinking about it. Of course, take your time. She was recommended to go see a medium and I went with her and my cousin went with us. And it was actually a famous medium who's famous now, but at the time I never had heard of it. And it was in an office building on Long Island. He sat behind a desk, we sat in chairs. It was surreal to me that we were going to see like an office visit. And he felt the presence of my brother in law, Stephen. He described his personality, he knew his sarcasm. He said, he's really a sarcastic guy. And we laughed because, you know, he said things that were particular to his personality that no one would just know. And his message to my sister was that he was at peace and he wanted her to be happy. So we left feeling better. For sure, it was just an emotional experience all around, but I have to say the healing of it was such a comfort. Whether or not he was, he did research. You know, I was a skeptic going in, but I was a believer at leaving because just the way he put her at ease. And he also referenced another relative who we weren't. We were so focused on the one person that we wanted to connect with that we didn't. When he referenced other people, we didn't think about it. And when we got into the car driving home, all three of us with my cousin and my sister, it was another cousin that we mutually shared that he was referencing and trying to connect with us. So overall it was a positive, positive experience. And I've never gone again. I've never had the need to or felt the urge to, but it was a positive experience.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (10:53)

Rose, thank you so much for calling in and for sharing everything that you went through. I did get that from the film the Sense of closure that many of the psychics offered people. Do you think people came for closure?

Allison Stewart (11:07)

Yeah, I mean, I think this is not unlike any other religious belief system in that it's a way of finding closure, finding meaning in these unimaginable losses.

Caller Mira (11:20)

It's.

Allison Stewart (11:20)

One of the people in the film describes it as grieving out loud at one point. So, yeah, that's. That's part of what I mean when I say that everyone has different ideas about what happens when we die and if there's an afterlife and what that's like. But I think that coming together and remembering someone and sharing that memory and having this kind of connection with someone else in person is. Can be really meaningful, no matter what your religious beliefs are.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (11:47)

Yeah. One of the first people in your documentary is a doctor, and she's very straightforward, and she had a small girl who died in her arms, and she wants to know if she's all right. Why did you want to talk? Why did you want to start with a person of science talking about psychics?

Allison Stewart (12:05)

Yeah. As soon as we filmed that session, I knew this is the opening scene of the movie because, yeah, she's an emergency room doctor. Science background, as you say. It's so unexpected that this person would be coming to see a psychic. And what's interesting about it is that she also encapsulates some of themes of the film. In a way, she's a healer who herself needs healing, like many of the psychics are, and, you know, like we all are in ways. And she comes in, she describes how she had no way to navigate this death that she witnessed when she was a young doctor. And you can only imagine since then, in the 30 years of working in ERS, how much she has seen and how much loss she's experienced. But she didn't have the kind of spiritual support she needed at that moment. She had no one to turn to, no training that could help her. And so Here she is 30 years later. This has been weighing heavily on her. And she comes to the psychic, and she isn't even coming from a place of. I wonder what you think of this. She actually asked the psychic, how is that girl? How is that girl who died 30 years ago? And it's such a startling moment. So I wanted to open with it because of all the thematic relevance it has, but also how it would catch audiences off guard, I hoped. And no matter where you are in the belief spectrum coming in, you can be surprised by it.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (13:24)

We're talking to Lana Wilson. Her film is Look Into My Eyes. It Opens at theaters tomorrow, September 6th. How does one become a psychic of the people you spoke to? How did they all discover they had this skill?

Allison Stewart (13:39)

You know, they had different paths into this, very different ones. You know, a few of them grew up in a traditional religion and found as they grew up that there was not a place for their identity, for acceptance for them inside that religion. So they were seeking another place that addressed similar questions to traditional religion. So that was how they came to it. Several of them experienced a particular loss, whether a death or a breakup. In one case, that felt like a death, and that brought them to psychics for the first time. There's one animal intuitive in the movie who was basically isolated in her apartment, very depressed for many, many years, didn't like people, and in desperation one day was persuaded by her therapist to take a random chorus at Kripalu. That was animal communication. And this woman was like, what? Animal communication? Are you kidding me? This is nonsense. But she went to the chorus and it felt good. And what was interesting about it was it wasn't just the chorus itself. It was. She felt connected to the other people who were in the chorus. So she bonded with them and thought, these are the kind of people that I like. They're sensitive like me. And so that gave her this new perspective on her own life, and that's how she started doing this. So there's. There's many different paths.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (14:58)

What surprised you making this film?

Allison Stewart (15:00)

One thing that surprised me was realizing there's this odd parallel between myself as a documentary director and a documentary subject and the relationship between a psychic and a client. As I filmed with the psychics at home, as they opened up to me and, you know, shared all this vulnerability and all of their pain with me in this very powerful way. I kept flashing back to the psychic readings I'd filmed earlier and thinking and thinking, this dynamic's kind of similar. Did I just ask the psychic a question that they asked a client earlier? But I, I, it taught me that I think we all need witnesses to better understand ourselves. And one thing that I think many of the subjects of documentaries I've made have in common is that, you know, why does this. So why does someone agree to be in a documentary about them? Well, I think it's in part because they have this curiosity. What will happen if I let this total stranger, this outsider to my life, come in and deeply witness me and then hold a mirror up to me and tell me a story about what they see reflected there? That's what I am doing in my work. Every day. And it's not unlike what the psychics are doing with their clients, too.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (16:08)

Listeners, we'd love to hear from you once again. Judgment free zone. Have you been to a psychic? How would you describe your experience? Tell us your story. Our Phone number is 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. We'll continue my conversation with Lana Wilson, the director of Look Into My Eyes, after a quick break. This is all of it. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We're talking about a new film following the lives of seven psychics in New York with documentarian Lana Wilson. It's called Look Into My Eyes. It opens in theaters tomorrow. Let's talk to Mira on line one. Hi, Mira, thanks for calling in.

Caller Mira (16:58)

Hi. Thank you. Thanks for taking my call.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (17:02)

Sure.

Caller Mira (17:04)

So I called in because I've been working as a psychic, tarot reader, past life reader, astrologer for over 45 years. I'm also a psychotherapist. So I started that later than. And I've done that for, I don't know, about 35 years, I guess. And because I also wanted a traditional career. And I've had a lot of experiences, certainly with patients who had been inpatient or in difficult circumstances who came to being psychic through trauma. And that is definitely part of my childhood story. And I've been working with people who come and just sit down for a reading, like at various fairs, as well as I have, like, a private practice in that. And so that I don't know the person at all. And they'll ask maybe about a past life where they'll ask for a tarot reading. And I'm always amazed at how much it resonates with them, considering that most people don't tell me anything about themselves. It's not like a long discussion. So that just the other day I had someone come and sit down, and he wanted to know about his past lives. He was a gentleman who was probably in his 50s or so. And so what I saw with him was that he was on a beach, a sandy beach, and that he was collecting shells and making jewelry for his sisters who were other children around him. And that he later became a person, like a kind of priest or religious person in his community, and that he took in children who needed support in that community. And that what I guessed was that this was several hundred years ago and his daughter was sitting with him and she said, you should tell her what you do and how this relates to you. Now and so it turned out that he had founded a. He did have a number of different sisters, but he had founded a child care center and worked with children and with particularly supporting children in his neighborhood.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (19:47)

You know what, we're going to thank.

Allison Stewart (19:48)

You for sharing your story. Mira.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (19:49)

We're going to pick up with our guest, Lana Wilson. You know, it's interesting that she said that she was a psychotherapist and a psychic. Where does the job of psych begin and end? Because this is a little bit. It's not controversial, but it's part of the. Of the film.

Allison Stewart (20:04)

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's. There's many, many different answers to that. But, you know, where does the job of psychic begin and end? It's, it's. People can define it however they want. And again, I saw more in common personally with like, faith and religious leaders rather than therapists a lot of the time, because I think it's talking about things we can't see. You know, believing in things we can't see, hearing stories about things we can't literally prove but that we feel or want to feel, but talking about an afterlife where it's less about what's real and what's not and more about how does this belief affect the way you live your life now. So I saw more in common with religion in that way, but with therapy. You know, there's one person who's in the film who used to be a therapist and felt frustrated that she couldn't bring more spirituality into her practice as a therapist. So this was a way for her of working with clients who were themselves spiritual people and didn't want to limit what they were talking about to the precepts of therapy. This is also something that, you know, has existed for thousands of years longer than therapy has. So it's. It's been a tradition around the world in all different kinds of cultures for a long time. And I think that that is not because the psychics are necessarily predicting everything correctly, but I think it's more about the meaning that these experiences have for people and how it leaves them feeling changed or different or comforted or healed a lot of the time afterwards.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (21:35)

How do the clients feel about being filmed?

Allison Stewart (21:37)

Well, the clients I found by, we spread out all over the city. It was during COVID that we were filming this. So I had people set up tables where people went during COVID outside grocery stores, in parks, farmers markets, with signs that said free psychic readings. And we translated these signs into several different languages. So if someone approached the table, they would talk to the person behind the table. And they would say, we're making a documentary where we're filming all these sessions. Is it okay with you? We'll give you a free session, but can we film it? And if people said okay, then I would talk to them or someone who worked with me, and we'd get a sense of what their questions would be. And then I would matchmake them with the psychics we were filming with. So each psychic who was coming in that day, so the clients already knew they were going to be filmed. But another thing I did was the camera filming the clients was unmanned. No one was behind it.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (22:27)

Interesting.

Allison Stewart (22:28)

So they saw no one looking at them. And I actually set it all up in a way so that I wasn't in the room. No one was in the room. Focus is being operated out of the room. There was one cinematographer in the room, but who was outside of the eye line of the clients. So I think that helped people feel comfortable and alone and private on camera as well.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (22:48)

Let's talk to Mark. Hi, Mark, thanks for calling Olivet.

Caller Mark (22:52)

Hi, Allison. Thanks so much for taking my call. I have a question about the gendering of the demographic that has an emotional investment not only in spiritualism or so called psychic readings, but also in astrology and a host of other New Age belief systems. And before I sharpen the point of my question, I want to make it emphatically clear. I don't think women are by nature, quote, unquote, whatever that means, inclined to be more credulous than men. But I do think there's a social construction of femininity that suggests women should be more emotional and that they should rely on things like astrology and spiritualism and so forth. And so I really wish the documentarian had problematized this whole practice. It's all fine and well to do oral histories or ethnographies. And I also think you as a journalist, it's great to create a space in which people can share their stories. But as a fellow journalist, I believe it's a journalist's job to raise the difficult questions. For example, you know, I'm going to.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (24:01)

Stop you there for one second only because you made your point and I appreciate it. Did you want to respond?

Allison Stewart (24:06)

Yeah. Well, I think these are great points, you know, and I think that if you see the film, I think there are a lot of challenges that are put out there. And, you know, the psychics themselves talk about their own doubt about what they do. And is this real? Is it not real? What does it mean? So I think there is a huge amount of doubt and skepticism in the film.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (24:26)

And also it's very much shared gender in terms of the psychics you have, the people who come and are clients.

Allison Stewart (24:35)

It's really kind of interesting. Yeah.

Interviewer / Host (Alison Stewart) (24:37)

We are going to close on this. I want to remind people that the film Look Into My Eyes opens in theaters tomorrow September 6th. You can go see it and make a decision for yourself. My guest has been Lana Wilson. Lana, thank you so much.

Allison Stewart (24:50)

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