Christopher Nolan says his Peloton instructor absolutely dragged him for Tenet

One of the dangers of being Christopher Nolan—at least, we have to assume—is that the planet’s over-abundance of opinions on Christopher Nolan movies is even harder to cope with for you than it is for the rest of us. Case in point: A recent anecdote, reported by Variety, that Nolan told while picking up a best director award from the New York Film Critics Circle, revealing that he once got completely savaged in a Peloton class by an instructor with some casually dismissive remarks about his movie Tenet.

“I was on my Peloton. I’m dying,” Nolan told the crowd. “And the instructor started talking about one of my films and said, ‘Did anyone see this? That’s a couple hours of my life I’ll never get back again!’” And, like, fair play to the man: We don’t have to catch crap about some article we spent four hours on while we’re going grocery shopping, so we can’t imagine what hearing this sort of thing about a movie you blew up a whole entire airplane to make, mid-virtual-bike-ride, would feel like.

Nolan, who was being honored for his work on Oppenheimer, was telling the story to illustrate a point about the value of professional criticism, in a world where, much like the humble asshole, everyone possesses both an opinion and a platform with which to expose it. (Even moreso if they have command over a Peloton class! These are the people who murdered Mr. Big!) “When Rex Reed takes a shit on your film he doesn’t ask you to work out,” Nolan 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.”

Update: Because the internet is, sometimes, amazing, online sleuths (specifically, Samantha Cole of 404 Media) appear to have dug up the actual Peloton clip in question, featuring regular instructor Jenn Sherman, and she actually goes quite a bit harder on Nolan’s movie than he originally gave her credit for. While playing music from the movie’s soundtrack, Sherman asks, “This song is from the soundtrack of a movie called Tenet. Anybody see this shit? Did anybody see this besides me? ‘Cuz I need a manual… I’m not kidding, what the fuck was going on in that movie? You need to be a neuroscientist to understand. That’s two and a half hours of my life I want back.” We cannot imagine hearing that about our movie while trying to do a workout; we also can’t wait to dive in to her Letterboxd next.