Culture / Film & TV

Director Adria Petty’s ‘Nu 6′ is an Ear-ie Exclusive

November 17th, 2011

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Director Adria Petty came up with the idea for her black and white film, 'NU-6,' while stuck in an ear infirmary. She began her career making music videos for Regina Spektor and, most recently, co-directed Beyoncé's joyful (and catchy) 'Countdown.' And, yes, she is Tom Petty's daughter.

“NU6 is a film I made while recovering from two ruptured eardrums I acquired during a bad cold. At the time I was finishing a commercial with model Jessica Cook who I really wanted to shoot again. But I was deaf.

I went to LA’s House Ear infirmary many times to test my hearing. I felt so isolated and distinctly in the twilight zone in this hospital with an enormous ear in the lobby and the bomb shelter of a hearing test room. As I listened to the Northwestern University Auditory Test No.6 (NU-6), which included words like “love, fail, home, void, etc,” a stream of images came to me. Private, absurd, and sometimes upsetting images floated through my head as an Indian woman typed her data behind me. I felt so alone and frustrated that I was unable to hear, which also had a funny side effect of making me not really want to speak. Speaking all of these evocative words out loud to a stranger was so embarrassing.

A ‘true story’ emerged. In order to exorcise the restlessness and the frustration of not being able to hear, I gathered some friends for an afternoon and shot this little film on a canon 5-D while I was still sick. It is a surreal poem about the experience I was having at that time. I felt certain at the end that the reason my ears gave up on me was because they had been listening to far too much bullshit in the past months, and, quite possibly, the entire lifetime I had experienced up to that time. So I tried to see the beauty and the irony in it, and share it.”


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