According to experts, one of the best ways to stay motivated to exercise is to find joy and community in the work. If that’s what Christopher Nolan was looking for when he signed up for a Peloton membership, he was sorely disappointed. The veteran filmmaker revealed recently that he was roasted mid-cycle by his instructor, who took issue with one of his movies.
“I was on my Peloton. I’m dying,” Nolan told the room while accepting a prize from the New York Film Critics Circle on Wednesday. “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!’”
The director was making a larger point about the nature of film criticism and left out some of the finer points of his anecdote, including which of his movies had so perturbed his instructor, as well as that instructor’s identity. But this is the internet, after all, and unlike in 2006’s The Prestige, people here are really looking for the secret. They really want to know.
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Citizen detectives in the Peloton community quickly figured out the who, what, and when of Nolan’s story, with a member of its official Facebook group posting a clip of a 30-minute “intervals and arms” class hosted on Dec. 28, 2020 by instructor Jenn Sherman, according to a 404 Media report on Thursday.
Over the strains of Travis Scott’s ‘The Plan,’ Sherman tells the class that the track is from “the soundtrack of a movie called Tenet.”
“Anybody see this shit? Did anybody see this besides me?” she continues, blithely unaware that she’s just given one of her cyclers a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Because I need a manual. Someone’s got to explain this. Yeah I’m not kidding, what the fuck 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 I want back. I want it back.”
Reps for Sherman and Peloton did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
Despite apparently carrying it with him for the past three years, Nolan made light of the inadvertent insult while airing it this week. “When [film critic] Rex Reed takes a shit on your film, he doesn’t ask you to work out,” he quipped.
At the very least, he can console himself that he made the speech as he was accepting an award for his directing—though notably not for his work on Tenet, but rather Oppenheimer.
