Peloton instructor Jenn Sherman didn’t expect acclaimed director Christopher Nolan to be taking her class when she filmed one of his movies. Now she backs down and promises him a trip without insults.
At the New York Film Critics Circle dinner Wednesday night, Nolan received the best director award for “Oppenheimer,” and the filmmaker used his acceptance speech to share an anecdote about the need for film criticism. “I was in my Peloton doing some high intervals [training] …panting and dying,” he began, according to Variety. “The instructor started talking about one of my movies and said, ‘Has anyone seen this?’ That’s a couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back!’”
After the audience chuckled, Nolan expressed his appreciation for professional film critics, joking, “When Rex Reed takes… in your movie, he doesn’t ask you to work with him anymore!”
The filmmaker went on to allude to the way social media (and apparently Peloton) has turned anyone with a smartphone into a critic with a platform. “In today’s world, where opinions are everywhere, there is a kind of idea that film criticism is becoming democratized, but I believe that critical appreciation of films should not be an instinct, but a profession.”
“What we have here tonight is a group of professionals trying to be objective,” Nolan continued. “Obviously, writing about film objectively is a paradox, but aspirations for objectivity are what make criticism vital, timeless, and useful to filmmakers and the film community.”
Sherman learned that Nolan had taken one of her virtual classes, but she didn’t expect him to have been pedaling in her class when she mocked his 2020 sci-fi action movie “Tenet.” Mortified that he had witnessed her tirade, she posted a TikTok trying to clarify things.
“Big day for me when I find out that the one and only Christopher Nolan, one of the leading filmmakers of the 21st century, knows who the hell I am,” Sherman began his video. “I was excited. And then I read the article.”
“Listen, it was 2020. It was a dark time,” he said, backtracking on his amateurish criticism. “I’m on the platform, teaching my little class, and I’m talking like I’m known to do and I make a random comment about a movie I had seen the night before. What do you think the odds are that the director of said film will take that route some four years later?
Sherman then turned to the director again and admitted that, although he didn’t understand a minute of “what the hell was going on in ‘Tenet,’” he had seen “Oppenheimer” twice.
“And those are six hours of my life that I never want to give back. So, Mr. Nolan, I invite you to come take a ride with me in the Peloton studio. You can take my class. We will have a great time, you will sit in the front row and I promise there will be no insults.”
To be fair, Jonathan Romney’s review of “Tenet” for The Times also addressed the confusing nature of the film. “‘Principle’ It really is as paradoxically complex as we would like to be led to believe, but who knows?” he wrote. “The latest from Nolan It may well be full of sound and fury, meaning nothing, or it may mean something imponderably resonant, and mean it forward, backward and inside out. Does your head hurt already?
