Jenn Sherman, the Peloton instructor who made headlines Thursday after Christopher Nolan recalled comments she made about Tenet during a Peloton class he took, has responded and invited the director to join her in the Peloton Studio.
“Huge day for me when I come to 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 said in a video posted to her Instagram.
Continuing, Sherman said she only realized after reading headlines that Nolan’s mention of her was referring to a class in which she criticized his 2020 film Tenet.
“This song is from a soundtrack of a movie called Tenet,” Sherman tells the class in a clip that surfaced online. “Anybody see this shit? Did anybody see this besides me? 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 that I want back.”
In her response on Friday, Sherman said the class was filmed in 2020, which “was a dark time.”
“I’m up on the platform, teaching my little class, and I’m running my mouth off like I’m known to do,” Sherman said. “And I made a random comment about a movie I’d seen the night before. What do you think the odds are that the director of said movie would take that ride some four years later? Yeah, that would only happen to me.”
She finished her video with a direct message for Nolan: “I may not have understood a minute of what the hell was going on in Tenet. That shit went right over my head. But I have seen Oppenheimer twice. And that’s six hours of my life that I don’t ever want to give back. So, Mr. Nolan, I’m inviting you to come take a ride with me in the Peloton Studio. You can critique my class. We’ll have a great time, you’ll sit in the front row and I promise you, it’ll be insult free.”
Nolan first shared his story while accepting the award for best director at the New York Film Critics Circle on Thursday. “I was on my Peloton doing a high-interval workout. I’m dying,” he told the crowd. “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 crowd responded to his anecdote with laughter, and Nolan continued with his speech.
“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,” he said. “What we have here tonight is a group of professionals who attempt objectivity. Obviously, writing about cinema objectively is a paradox, but the aspirations of objectivity is what makes criticism vital and timeless and useful to filmmakers and the filmmaking community.”
