First She Tackled Taylor Swift. Now it's Psychics
First She Tackled Taylor Swift. Now it's PsychicsDocumentarian Lana Wilson tells me about her moving new A24 film about psychics. Plus: Nikki Glaser brings the right balance of acid and sugar to the Globes
Buongiorno! Or, if you’re heading to the mountains of Colorado today instead of crossing bridges over the canals of Venice: Howdy! Not everyone in the film industry is lucky enough to be at either the Venice Film Festival or Telluride Film Festival this weekend. But if your Labor Day plans consist of a humble cookout and a nap, FOMO might convince you otherwise. There are bound to be at least a few newly minted masterpieces premiering at one of the two festivals this weekend, and hopefully a few that make their way to the Toronto Film Festival next week, where I’ll get the chance to see them. Early word is in on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a decades-in-the-making sequel that at least some critics say is pretty good! So the surprises are already rolling in. Today I’ve got a conversation with documentarian — and my college classmate — Lana Wilson, whose new film Look Into My Eyes is a surprisingly thoughtful and moving look at the lives and work of a handful of New York City psychics. But first, a heartfelt congratulations to a recent Prestige Junkie podcast guest who will be hosting next year’s Golden Globes — no, not Gary Oldman. Not yet, at least. Nikki Glaser’s Golden Moment When I spoke to Nikki Glaser in July about her Emmy nomination for her comedy special Someday You’ll Die, she admitted that when she first received congratulatory texts she thought she’d gotten the job to host the ceremony. “Not only was I so excited that I was nominated for an Emmy, but then this big job that I was going to have to say yes to was suddenly taken off the table. I was like, ‘Oh, I just get to go to the Emmys? This is good.’” Turns out, another awards show eventually came calling. On Aug. 28, the Golden Globe Awards announced Glaser as its next host for the show which will air on Jan. 5. The Golden Globes have more or less recovered from the reckoning that led them to add a ton of new members and promise an end to the embarrassing and alleged illegal behavior that had defined them in some Hollywood circles. The awards that aired earlier this year earned 9.4 million viewers, up 50 percent from the previous year but, yes, down 50 percent from 2020 (my colleague Richard Rushfield was not a fan, dubbing them the RC Cola of awards shows). Despite the efforts of shows like the Critics Choice and SAG Awards to elbow in, the Globes still retain their status as the prime pre-Oscars awards show. The show has perhaps not yet bounced back from its hosting controversies of the last several years. During January’s show, host Jo Koy lost the crowd almost immediately, earning an instantly viral Taylor Swift scowl and a swift trip back to his incredibly lucrative comedy touring act, where he surely won’t miss the awards show stage at all. In 2023, host Jerrod Carmichael was on firmer ground with critics and the stars in the room, but also set an odd tone with deliberately antagonistic moments like sitting down onstage and talking about hosting a show for an “embattled white organization.” Glaser is famous for her stand-up but even more for her appearances at roasts like Tom Brady’s, which suggests she’s being brought in as a host in the vein of Ricky Gervais, who both thrilled and delighted viewers with jokes like comparing Joe Pesci to Baby Yoda. For those of us who take our awards shows a little too seriously — and for some of the talent in the room who didn’t get dressed up just to get mocked — Gervais’s tone always seemed much meaner than the circumstances required. To me, though, Glaser might be the perfect balance of Gervais’s bite with the joshing, “We’re all friends here!” vibe that defines the Globes at their best. Unlike Koy, she’s famous enough to be well-known by most of the nominees — something Jimmy Kimmel has always used to his advantage at the Oscars — but also sharp enough for her jokes to land. And there’s an energy and lightness to even her most cutting jokes that could help her land a few good lines but still leave everybody in a good mood. At the very least, Glaser is an avowed Swiftie — so if Taylor is in the audience this year, she won’t be frowning this time. The Eyes Have ItAs someone who interviews people for a large chunk of my job, I’m always fascinated when an interview happens with someone who is, themselves, often the interviewer. Having known Lana Wilson since we shared a few film classes back at Wesleyan in the early 2000s, I’ve been especially fascinated watching her films, where she gets revealing, insightful answers from subjects as varied as abortion doctors, a Buddhist priest and Taylor Swift. While she was working on her two most recent features — Miss Americana, about Swift, and Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields — she was drawn over and over again to people who ask questions for a living, too. She first had the idea for a film about New York City psychics shortly after the 2016 election, but when Covid lockdowns began in 2020, the story had even more power. “We were obviously more isolated than ever, lonelier than ever, valuing the preciousness of in-person human connection more than ever,” Wilson says now. “So it just felt like the right moment.”  In Look Into My Eyes, which A24 will release in theaters on September 6, Wilson sits in on a series of sessions with psychics and then follows many of them home, patiently exploring what it takes to tap into the unknown on behalf of strangers but pursue your own life as well. Setting aside the questions of whether psychics are doing something “real,” the film captures their very evident impact, from emotional breakthroughs akin to a therapy session to providing an outlet for the psychics themselves to grapple with their own lives through their work. Many of them aspiring actors or writers, the psychics were in some ways easier to film and interview than Swift or Shields. But Wilson says there’s a key to building trust and confidence on camera that’s the same with anyone she’s ever made a film about. “Any time you’re making a documentary with someone, they’re really brave to want to do this,” she says. “They’re taking this leap of faith with you. What felt similar was me trying to be a sensitive, compassionate presence and nonjudgmental presence for everyone.” Because so many of Wilson’s subjects had lost their office spaces during the pandemic, she and her team set up spaces for them, creating a minimalist contrast to the “messy reality and chaos” of their lives at home. The spaces are technically artificial, but host an incredible outpouring of very real emotion — a phenomenon that allowed Wilson to see the link between her subjects and herself. “A big discovery for me while making Look Into My Eyes was finding this parallel between the psychic and the client and me and my subject,” she says. “Because it’s people who are willing to be witnessed by strangers, whether it’s a psychic or whether it’s an audience in a cinema. But it’s also the idea that sure, an aspect of this is constructed, but it’s also real and meaningful.” Wilson jokes that she got her start as a documentarian because she was “too cowardly to make fiction films,” but she actually has a script for a narrative feature she wrote during the pandemic, and last year took a workshop on directing actors. “So much of the stuff I was learning directly applies to documentary,” she tells me. “Because you are eliciting performances from people, and it’s all about the kind of psychology of people who are in your film.” After 15 years of making documentaries, Wilson says she’s realized she enjoys “the most fictitious edges” of the process — building office spaces for the psychics of Look Into My Eyes, for example, or picking the outfits for the priest at the center of The Departure. “One thing that was surprising to me making documentaries was realizing everything is on a spectrum between nonfiction and fiction,” she says. Her next project, which she’s planning to take out to financiers this fall, might fall on a different end of that spectrum — but it seems safe to assume Wilson will still be asking the right questions, and getting fascinating answers from whoever’s captured by her camera. Follow us: X | Facebook | Instagram | Threads ICYMI
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