★★★☆☆
Woody Harrelson seems such a low-key, Zen creature that any moment he might just slip off into transcendental meditation, and this quality stood him in good stead last night as he directed and starred in a live film, with a crew of nearly four hundred, which was simultaneously streamed to 550 cinemas around the world at 2am. A single shot, a single night, a singular chance for an omnishambles.
Other directors might have had a heart attack at the news that a Second World War bomb had been found in the Thames yesterday afternoon, preventing filming on London Bridge for the final scene, but Harrelson stayed calm and tested alternative locations until the bridge was free. Besides, he had 14 other locations to worry about, including a camper van and a taxi, while indoor scenes were filmed in a nightclub and a police station set up inside the old Central St Martins art school.
The movie opens with the note “Too much of this is true . . .” and concerns a comic “lost” night at the Chinawhite club in London when the actor ended up in a police cell. Harrelson plays himself and his best friend, Owen Wilson, is at his side in a brown-suede Afghan hippy jacket. Willie Nelson also turns up as a sort of singing angel. Eleanor Matsuura plays Harrelson’s wife, Laura, who becomes incandescent over a tabloid front page which shows that he slept with three women at once.
While Laura storms off with their children, Harrelson goes on a bender with a gang of guys, one of whom alleges that he is an Iranian prince called Alan, and goes clubbing. Naturally, it all goes belly up.
While thousands watched live in cinemas from Nashville to New York, and at Picturehouse London, I arrived on set at Central St Martins at 1am to view Lost in London with the crew on a screen in the canteen. “Soy milk, Woody’s a vegan,” someone said as we hit the coffee hard, and I went on a tour of the nightclub, cell and bar stages, where the courageous cameraman, John Hembrough, would film his single, infinite, spinning, walking, talking 100-minute shot.
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It was oddly discombobulating to watch the movie and also look out into the street to see the choreographed chaos of live filming, and until minutes before the start the sound wasn’t working properly. But miraculously, the final version went without a visible hitch.
The script manages both to be a hagiography and a takedown of Harrelson, with many mentions of his roles from Cheers to Natural Born Killers to The People v Larry Flynt. But Harrelson has made a brave directing debut here with the world’s first live-streamed movie, although Sebastian Schipper made the 138-minute single-shot Victoria in 2015, following a wild night out in Berlin. Could these entertainingly bonkers, technical high-wire acts be a new trend in cinema?