Academy Award nominated director Christopher Nolan recalled an awkward experience when his Peloton instructor started ripping into one of his films during a live workout, not realizing he was taking the class.
“I was on my Peloton doing a high-interval workout. I’m dying,” Nolan said while accepting the award for Best Director from the New York Film Critics Circle on Wednesday, per The Hollywood Reporter. “The instructor started talking about one of my films and said, ‘Has anyone else seen this? Because that’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back again.’”
The instructor was apparently referring to the 2020 movie “Tenet” during her rant.
Nolan went on to say how “directors have a complex emotional relationship with critics and criticism,” but mentioned how receiving bad reviews from critics is very different from getting those types of remarks from regular citizens, including fitness instructors.
“When [film critic] Rex Reed takes a s*** on your film, he doesn’t ask you to work out!” the “Oppenheimer” director joked. “In today’s world, where opinions are everywhere, there is a sort of idea that film criticism is being democratized. But I, for one, think the critical appreciation of films shouldn’t be an instinct, but it should be a profession.”
After Nolan delivered his acceptance speech, internet sleuths were able to track down the workout class clip in question and started circulating it online.
Instructor Jenn Sherman says during the virtual class, “This song is from a soundtrack of a movie called ‘Tenet.’ Anybody see this s***? Did anybody see this besides me? Because I need a manual. Someone’s got to explain this. Yeah, I’m not kidding, what the f*** was going on in that movie? Do you understand? Seriously, you need to be a neuroscientist to understand. And that’s two and a half hours of my life that I want back.”
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“Tenet” is a science fiction action thriller starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine, and Kenneth Branagh. The storyline follows a former CIA agent who is tasked with tracing the origin of objects traveling backwards through time and establishing how they play into an attack on the present from the future.
The movie grossed $365 million worldwide against a $200 million budget, making it the fifth highest-grossing film of 2020 and the first major movie to open in theaters following the pandemic.
“Tenet” had mixed critic reviews, but was nominated for two Academy Awards and won for Best Visual Effects.