Woody Harrelson’s Lost in Lon­don was a crazy, com­pelling triumph

Appar­ent­ly unde­terred by the ungod­ly 2am start time, Lon­don­ers descend­ed en masse on Fri­day morn­ing to take part in a unique event in movie his­to­ry: the first fea­ture-length film to be shot and broad­cast live in a cin­e­ma. Audi­ences for Woody Harrelson’s bizarre brain­child Lost in Lon­don filled no less than three screens at the only cin­e­ma in the UK tak­ing part in this unprece­dent­ed exper­i­ment – an impres­sive num­ber which high­lights a thirst for new and unusu­al the­atri­cal experiences.

But if alter­na­tive con­tent such as live broad­casts of the­atre pro­duc­tions or operas has already proven suc­cess­ful, Harrelson’s project is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent propo­si­tion. The actor-turned-direc­tor, along with his 400-strong crew, may just have cre­at­ed a com­plete­ly new medi­um: ​‘live cinema’.

What makes this daunt­ing idea so joy­ous and excit­ing is the degree of risk it entailed. The film wasn’t sim­ply broad­cast as it was being made, it was also shot entire­ly in a sin­gle take, by a sin­gle cam­era oper­a­tor, recre­at­ing some­thing akin to Sebas­t­ian Schipper’s 2015 film Vic­to­ria, which Har­rel­son acknowl­edged as a key influ­ence in a post-screen­ing Q&A. Part of the appeal of Lost in Lon­don isn’t so much the mor­bid desire to see things go wrong, but the delight in watch­ing an ambi­tious film work despite all the ways it could have failed. Moments of sus­pense – such as actors fluff­ing their lines or ​‘dead’ time that would oth­er­wise nev­er make it into the final cut – were under­stand­ably fre­quent, but brought an agree­able fresh­ness to pro­ceed­ings that evokes live the­atre in the best pos­si­ble way.

Instead of rest­ing on the lau­rels of his tech­ni­cal achieve­ment, Har­rel­son has found a tru­ly nov­el way of com­bin­ing for­mal audac­i­ty with a good sto­ry. Indeed, it’s in wit­ness­ing the con­trast between the ambi­tion of the project and Harrelson’s own self-dep­re­ca­tion that the film is most intriguing.

Lost in Lon­don recounts, elab­o­rates and exag­ger­ates auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal events which occurred to the Nat­ur­al Born Killers star some years back. While in Lon­don work­ing on a play, Har­rel­son became the object of a tabloid scan­dal involv­ing a drunk­en orgy that near­ly end­ed his mar­riage. Hard­ly the sort of sto­ry one would expect from some­one dar­ing to break the mould. The con­trast between this thought­less man – whose bad deci­sions even saw him wind up in jail – and the ded­i­cat­ed, hard-work­ing direc­tor he shows him­self to be here makes Harrelson’s film feel more sin­cere self-exam­i­na­tion than van­i­ty project.

In fact, Har­rel­son and his wife Lau­ra have moved on so far from those dark times that they have worked togeth­er to make a com­e­dy about the whole ter­ri­ble affair. The direc­tor makes his inten­tions clear from the start when his past self states that he wish­es he would stop being cast in dra­mas and could make peo­ple laugh again. Harrelson’s mot­to is ​‘tragedy plus time equals com­e­dy’, but it doesn’t real­ly apply here, con­sid­er­ing that the film strives to make events appear as though they were hap­pen­ing in the imme­di­ate present. The humour doesn’t lie in the script’s annoy­ing­ly offen­sive jokes either. A dis­turb­ing rape joke ear­ly on set the tone for an alter­na­tive­ly sex­ist and racist sense of humour.

Oth­er jokes land very well. In addi­tion to the ludi­crous fight and chase sequences – pre­sum­ably inten­si­fied for com­ic effect – the film seeks to drama­tise the sto­ry by cast­ing Owen Wil­son as him­self, although his per­son­al­i­ty in the film keen­ly recalls that of his char­ac­ter from Meet the Par­ents. As a friend prone to mak­ing hurt­ful remarks and with a weird pen­chant for pseu­do-spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, Wilson’s trade­mark wit makes his scenes with Har­rel­son a high­light. The two actors are friends in real life, and much of the film’s com­e­dy lies in its self-reflex­iv­i­ty. Ref­er­ences to Harrelson’s own flag­ging career at the time (the idea was for­mu­lat­ed pre True Detec­tive) are fre­quent­ly hilar­i­ous, with an argu­ment between the two stars over the legit­i­ma­cy of Wes Ander­son pro­vid­ing the film’s best one lin­ers (“You got out-act­ed by a dog in Mar­ley & Me!”).

This humour cou­pled with the film’s daz­zling tech­ni­cal accom­plish­ments give it last­ing val­ue beyond its unique ​‘live’ aspect. And yet, any poten­tial future screen­ings of the record­ed pro­duc­tion would inevitably be unable to repro­duce the thrilling and even scary free-fall sen­sa­tion of watch­ing a film that must have felt as unpre­dictable to its mak­ers as it did the audi­ence. As corny as it may sound, you real­ly had to be there.