During an acceptance speech for winning best director from the New York Film Critics Circle for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan cracked a joke about getting roasted for making a deeply confusing movie by a Peloton instructor during a workout.
“I was on my Peloton. I’m dying. 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!'” Nolan said, as Variety reported on Thursday. “When [film critic] Rex Reed takes a shit on your film he doesn’t ask you to work out! 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.”
The idea of Nolan—who famously doesn’t own a smartphone—catching strays while sweating over a fancy internet-connected stationary bike is really funny. But all day today, the internet has been asking: What movie was the instructor talking about? And which instructor was it?