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Christopher Nolan is arguably on track this year to finally win the Academy Award for Best Director for his blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer—he’s been nominated five times before, including for his devastating war drama Dunkirk. However, that doesn’t mean the famed filmmaker doesn’t often find himself on the receiving end of criticism.
While accepting the Best Director prize from the New York Film Critics Circle on Thursday, January 4, Nolan spoke about the “complex emotional relationship” he has with critics of his films and detailed one of his most confounding run-ins with a cinematic cynic. Per Variety, it involved a Peloton, with the filmmaker saying:
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!’ 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.
Social-media sleuths have seemingly tracked down the fitness instructor in question, who, in the below video, can be seen atop one of the brand’s pricey exercise bikes ranting about Nolan’s 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet:
They found the Peloton instructor and she’s brutal pic.twitter.com/i79Css1NLG https://t.co/dRcYUakC3CJanuary 4, 2024
Thankfully for the director, his latest, Oppenheimer, has garnered rave reviews from critics, fellow filmmakers like Denis Villeneuve And Paul Thomas Anderson, and moviegoing audiences. The film, which stars Cillian Murphy as “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer, pulled in a staggering $954 million last year, and may end up being the third Christopher Nolan movie to cross the billion-dollar mark at the box office thanks to various re-releases.
At the NYFCC ceremony, the filmmaker went on to praise professional film critics, whose work he called “vital and timeless and useful” to the tradition of cinema, but he did reveal that reading reviews can at times be an uncomfortable practice:
A question we’re always asked is: Do we read reviews? Let’s start with the fact that I’m British. A typical family gathering will involve relatives saying to me, ‘You know, Christopher. You probably shouldn’t open The Guardian today.’
However, he concluded his speech by acknowledging that ultimately it’s up to audiences, professional and otherwise, to interpret a cinematic work, no matter a director’s “authorial intent”:
In today’s world, as filmmakers you can’t hide behind authorial intent. You can’t say, ‘This is what I intended.’ We live in a world where the person receiving the story has the right to say what it means to them. I for one love that. It means the work should speak for itself. It’s not about what I say it is. It’s about what you receive it to be. In that world, the role of the professional critic, or the interpreter and the person who tries to give context for the reader…it’s incredibly important. I’ve never been so grateful for careful, considered and thoughtful writing about one of my films as I was for ‘Oppenheimer.’
We’ll see just how those ever-critical awards bodies interpret Nolan’s work as Oppenheimer navigates Oscar season. The biographical drama is already up for eight awards at this Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony, including Best Picture and Best Director. Will the Academy follow suit? Stay tuned!