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Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Cult filmmaker meets cult musician in a documentary that is hard to pin down
ELLIS PARK ★★★ (M) 105 minutes There's a limit to what a film can tell you about anyone in a couple of hours, but where the musician Warren Ellis is concerned, I'll venture this much: part of him wants to hide, while another part wants to be noticed (and perhaps to be noticed hiding). That ambivalence is apparent in his frenzied way of playing the violin with his back to the audience as part of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds or Dirty Three. In Justin Kurzel's intriguing though not especially coherent documentary, he's mostly a solo act. Still, he remains torn between candour and concealment – as we can see from the moment he appears, a skinny, swaying apparition whose swagman's beard, aviator sunglasses and rock star jewellery all form part of the most eye-catching kind of disguise. Ellis' contradictions must be partly what attracted Kurzel, who's better known for his fiction features, though he has a recurring interest in 'true stories' (sometimes grim ones, as in Snowtown and Nitram). The film is wilfully hard to pin down in its own right, employing some of the visual tricks Kurzel has used elsewhere to induce a feeling of instability, such as having backgrounds slide in and out of focus. It's not a conventional music documentary: Ellis is often shown playing, but rarely in public, and there's no attempt to cover the whole of his career, which took off in Melbourne in the early '90s. Nor do we see a great deal of his everyday life in Paris, where he's lived for decades. Nor is this a straightforward environmentalist tract, although the title derives from the Sumatran wildlife sanctuary Ellis co-founded in 2021, allowing animals rescued from traffickers to live out what remains of their lives in peace.
The Age
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Cult filmmaker meets cult musician in a documentary that is hard to pin down
ELLIS PARK ★★★ (M) 105 minutes There's a limit to what a film can tell you about anyone in a couple of hours, but where the musician Warren Ellis is concerned, I'll venture this much: part of him wants to hide, while another part wants to be noticed (and perhaps to be noticed hiding). That ambivalence is apparent in his frenzied way of playing the violin with his back to the audience as part of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds or Dirty Three. In Justin Kurzel's intriguing though not especially coherent documentary, he's mostly a solo act. Still, he remains torn between candour and concealment – as we can see from the moment he appears, a skinny, swaying apparition whose swagman's beard, aviator sunglasses and rock star jewellery all form part of the most eye-catching kind of disguise. Ellis' contradictions must be partly what attracted Kurzel, who's better known for his fiction features, though he has a recurring interest in 'true stories' (sometimes grim ones, as in Snowtown and Nitram). The film is wilfully hard to pin down in its own right, employing some of the visual tricks Kurzel has used elsewhere to induce a feeling of instability, such as having backgrounds slide in and out of focus. It's not a conventional music documentary: Ellis is often shown playing, but rarely in public, and there's no attempt to cover the whole of his career, which took off in Melbourne in the early '90s. Nor do we see a great deal of his everyday life in Paris, where he's lived for decades. Nor is this a straightforward environmentalist tract, although the title derives from the Sumatran wildlife sanctuary Ellis co-founded in 2021, allowing animals rescued from traffickers to live out what remains of their lives in peace.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It's very easy to make yourself appear like Bono': Warren Ellis on opening an animal sanctuary in Sumatra
When the pandemic forced musicians all over the world to cancel tours, Warren Ellis decided to take his career in a new direction. From the bounds of his home he co-founded an animal sanctuary in Sumatra, Indonesia. In 2021 the Dirty Three virtuoso and Nick Cave collaborator was introduced to the veteran animal rights activist Femke den Haas. Together they established the centre for old, disabled and displaced animals who couldn't be released into the wild. The sanctuary – Ellis Park – now lends its name to a documentary by the True History of the Kelly Gang film-maker Justin Kurzel: a stirring portrait of the park's inhabitants and dedicated caretakers. Immortalising Ellis's poignant first visit to the park in 2023, the documentary traverses the lush vegetation of Sumatra and ventures to Ellis's home town, Ballarat, and his studio in Paris, offering a glimpse into the life of a famously private Australian musician. 'I was very concerned at one point when we had half filmed it, and tried to get it stopped,' he says. Kurzel first heard about sanctuary during a catchup with Ellis at the 2021 Cannes film festival. 'Justin said to me, 'I'm curious why you did it and I think the answer's back where you were born,'' Ellis says. Returning to the schoolyard of his childhood and to his parents' home, the film's first half shows Ellis reckoning with his past in real time. In striking, intimate vignettes, he reflects on the indelible influence of his father – a musician who sacrificed the seeds of his dream career to care for his young family, and who taught Ellis songwriting by singing verses from poetry books. 'We filmed in there four days before the whole family disintegrated,' Ellis says, recalling his parents' ill health and his father's eventual death. 'I never thought I'd put that much of myself in [the film], and, as it transpired, the camera was on me when there were some big life things going on.' It was a conversation with a film-maker and fellow Cave accomplice, Andrew Dominik, that soothed Ellis's anxieties about being overexposed. 'If you're going to get something from it,' Dominik told him, 'you've got to open yourself up to the process.' When Ellis met Den Haas, the latter was running the Sumatra Wildlife Center, a 'tiny' reserve that provided vital rehabilitation to injured wildlife, especially victims of abuse and the illegal exotic pet trade. During their first conversation, Den Haas told Ellis about a 5,000 sq m plot of land neighbouring the centre. He immediately promised to buy it and donate the land to provide essential housing for unreleasable animals. 'He said, 'Doubts are toxic. There are no doubts; we just do it,'' Den Haas remembers. 'Within two weeks, we started to look at the land and make the deal with the landowners.' Within three or four months, the centre's size had increased fivefold and the sanctuary was operational. About this time 1,300 trafficked animals were confiscated nearby. For Den Haas, the timing was 'magical'. With the sanctuary up and running, her team now had the resources to offer these animals – many of them captured in Africa – life-saving veterinary care and shelter. Ellis Park provides a window into the lives of these animals and their caretakers, introduced in balletic, slow-motion closeups thanks to the deft, unobtrusive work of its cinematographer, Germain McMicking. 'Not once was his presence felt; he just dances around everything,' Ellis says. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion While Den Haas has previously protected the animals from overreaching film crews, she appreciated the sensitivity of Kurzel's team. 'They really came and filmed things how they were … And when you're watching the film, you get to see [the animals'] emotions and understand they're all individuals and have a unique and horrific background.' Ellis was conscious of the risks involved in documenting his own philanthropy: 'The problem is, it's very easy to make yourself appear a Bono-like character who's just grandstanding.' Upon his arrival in Sumatra, Den Haas welcomes him with open arms, inviting him to release an eagle rehabilitated by the centre. For Ellis, this posed a dilemma: he didn't want to 'look like some privileged guy that has built an animal sanctuary [to] blow out the candles [when] it's not even my birthday'. But with Den Haas's coaxing, Ellis accepts the honour in the film's moving climax. 'He didn't want to be in the spotlight, like, here's the guy that made it all possible,' Den Haas says. 'But he did make it all possible.' Ellis describes the film as an 'accident' that developed organically through his trust in Kurzel. Accordingly, the documentary has a living quality. The score – by Ellis, of course – was recorded as it was made, with the musician shown tinkering on his violin in paddocks and monkey cages, as well as improvising in the studio. These images cede to scenes shot in Sumatra while the embryonic music lingers – a reflection of the sanctuary's evolving form. Working on a film 'enables you to step out of that protective comfort zone that a band allows you to have and just do your thing for a common cause', says Ellis, for whom 'preciousness' is a young person's game. This common cause is clear in Ellis Park. Since the film was shot, the sanctuary has received an influx of bear cubs and baby gibbons whose mothers have been killed or injured by perpetrators of the illegal pet trade. Den Haas hopes it will soon shelter the bears in forested enclosures. The sanctuary is still growing, and so is Ellis. 'You know, I went over there expecting the film to be about abused monkeys and primates and birds,' he says, 'and I left there realising the most extraordinary animals are people.' Ellis Park is out now in Australian cinemas. The film will be released in the UK and Ireland in autumn 2025
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The film Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis tried to pull
In his early 20s, Warren Ellis stopped reading books. 'I was reading Bukowski, and I was like, I don't want to read about a drunk, I want to be one,' he says. 'If I'm gonna take drugs, I'm not gonna live it through Lou Reed's eyes, I'm gonna inject drugs. I'm not going to f---ing quote somebody, you know?' This reckless design for life has made and broken the Ballarat school teacher turned international rock star. No amount of reading could have informed his distinction as a musician, from the untethered attack of his violin in Dirty Three to his crucial role as Nick Cave's wild right hand and beyond. But drink and drugs brought trouble. So has the 'don't read it, just do it' thing. 'Justin [Kurzel] had sent me a synopsis of what he wanted to do, which I didn't read,' he says of the blueprint for Ellis Park, the documentary about his life and work that he had no intention or desire to make. The pitch he'd agreed to 'over a five-minute beer in Cannes' involved documenting his first visit to Ellis Park in Sumatra, the haven for wild animals rescued from trafficking he'd just helped to establish. Apart from a need for ongoing funding, Ellis was driven to highlight the inspiration of its remarkable team, led by Dutch activist Femke den Haas. But 18 months later, the day after he landed in Melbourne on Cave's Carnage tour in November 2022, the director of Snowtown and True History of the Kelly Gang turned up to collect him from his hotel. 'He's got the car there and I was like, 'Where are we going?' 'We're going to Ballarat'. And I'm like, 'What? Nobody f---ing told me'. He says, 'It was in the [synopsis]'. 'Well, you can't expect me to read it,' you know?' Like his volatile presence on stage, Ellis' intense, unfiltered style is plenty compelling up close. Seated in the foyer of a boutique South Yarra hotel in a shiny suit, shinier burgundy ankle boots and copious jewellery sparkling through his grizzled beard, he remains in constant, restless motion. 'I tried to pull the film the year after it was shot,' he says. 'I just suddenly wondered what I'd done. I had a camera on me at the most vulnerable time my life … I was going through a separation [he has two kids with French artist Delphine Ciampi], I'd been hooked on benzodiazepines for 10 years and I jumped off those. 'I had a breakdown after filming at the sanctuary and spent four months crawling around on my hands and knees eating peanut butter in an apartment, suicidal. I had to see a psychiatrist … The fact that the filming involved me being so personal was not part of my original thinking.' The trip to Ballarat to film his elderly parents and revisit scenes of his troubled early life had stirred some deeply buried trauma. In Kurzel and editor Nick Fenton's unwieldy final cut, those raw threads sit in jarring juxtaposition with the graphic horrors of animal trafficking in Indonesia. With its nod to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the idea of Ellis marching through the jungle with an enormous replica of Nina Simone's discarded chewing gum as a kind of totem of devotion — his book of 2021, Nina Simone's Gum, explains that obsession — looks decidedly unhinged. In the world of documentary filmmaking, he came to realise, such ideas are 'just a couple of pontoons you get to land on. And what happens swimming in between is anybody's guess. 'Music is like that, I find, in the studio. I've done enough of it to realise now a similarity. You can have an idea and when you get it done, it's really unfulfilling. Meanwhile, the stuff that you're not focusing on tends to develop of its own accord. 'These ideas Justin had, some were good. There's [unused] footage of me playing with Indonesian musicians and dancers and walking through the streets of Sovereign Hill and playing in paddocks full of cow shit and getting attacked by monkeys ... but the narrative, I think, only found itself in the editing.' And, ultimately, in the mind of the beholder. Ellis says he could only bear to watch the finished film once. In his reading, 'it's about this beautiful place that's being created in this community and about the good that people can do. 'Animals are like babies. They're born with their life, that's all they've got,' he says, dark eyes glistening. 'Most humans, we get a chance. We get some shot to make our destiny. Animals just have their life, and we need to stand up for them.' His life has been 'changed significantly', he says, by his dogs: a white German Shepherd and a Swiss Shepherd. 'Larry and Piglet. Piglet does therapy with me. They opened me up to something that feels like the closest thing to some sort of God – drawing the better qualities out of yourself, finding what's within you.' As awesome and humbling as it is, the Ellis Park sanctuary feels like an incredibly tenuous act of resistance against the overwhelming scale of the illegal wildlife trade: poaching, smuggling, habitat destruction, cruelty, corruption … But like hope itself, its existence is not negotiable. 'Hope is really fundamental,' Ellis says. 'At this point in my life, it feels like hanging onto hope is hanging onto life, and life is the greatest gift of all.' Loading It's a new way of thinking, he confesses, partly due to the unlikely intervention of a famous friend, Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers. 'He's an amazing human being. He's founded schools in Watts and Silver Lake,' Ellis says. 'When I was deciding this, it was not insubstantial expenditure for me and I called him, and he's like, 'Man, I encourage you to do this with all your heart. It'll open you up to something you never knew was possible'. 'The manager of a band I know, he's like, 'How much are the running costs?' I'm like, 'Dude, I don't f—ing know'. Now, probably a sensible person would have. But all my life it's been about not trying to understand too much. Just jumping. I mean, I was teaching and I gave it up to play in a band. I never really thought about the consequences.' For the sake of Ellis Park, its reluctant namesake has made his peace with the film that goes on general cinema release this week. 'What I love about the people there … they're being accountable for somebody else's actions, you know? That just feels to me fundamentally important. 'I've never wanted to tell my story, to sell my story. I don't feel like the world needs another boring musician's story,' he says, although these days, he admits, 'I do like reading some of them. I think there's just so many lives that are blown up to be something they aren't, and I didn't want to be adding to that. 'Justin really pushed me. He said, 'We can shoot it. We don't have to use it', and he allowed me to reclaim things, and in the space of that first day he became a true collaborator, like Nick or like [filmmaker colleague] Andrew Dominik: somebody you know has got you and that you can fail with. And it's OK. 'It's life. It's what happens. And I'm really grateful that it happened because it taught me I needed to confront stuff. I decided to go along with it the way I've always approached anything I do creatively. Just jump in.'
The Age
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
The film Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis tried to pull
In his early 20s, Warren Ellis stopped reading books. 'I was reading Bukowski, and I was like, I don't want to read about a drunk, I want to be one,' he says. 'If I'm gonna take drugs, I'm not gonna live it through Lou Reed's eyes, I'm gonna inject drugs. I'm not going to f---ing quote somebody, you know?' This reckless design for life has made and broken the Ballarat school teacher turned international rock star. No amount of reading could have informed his distinction as a musician, from the untethered attack of his violin in Dirty Three to his crucial role as Nick Cave's wild right hand and beyond. But drink and drugs brought trouble. So has the 'don't read it, just do it' thing. 'Justin [Kurzel] had sent me a synopsis of what he wanted to do, which I didn't read,' he says of the blueprint for Ellis Park, the documentary about his life and work that he had no intention or desire to make. The pitch he'd agreed to 'over a five-minute beer in Cannes' involved documenting his first visit to Ellis Park in Sumatra, the haven for wild animals rescued from trafficking he'd just helped to establish. Apart from a need for ongoing funding, Ellis was driven to highlight the inspiration of its remarkable team, led by Dutch activist Femke den Haas. But 18 months later, the day after he landed in Melbourne on Cave's Carnage tour in November 2022, the director of Snowtown and True History of the Kelly Gang turned up to collect him from his hotel. 'He's got the car there and I was like, 'Where are we going?' 'We're going to Ballarat'. And I'm like, 'What? Nobody f---ing told me'. He says, 'It was in the [synopsis]'. 'Well, you can't expect me to read it,' you know?' Like his volatile presence on stage, Ellis' intense, unfiltered style is plenty compelling up close. Seated in the foyer of a boutique South Yarra hotel in a shiny suit, shinier burgundy ankle boots and copious jewellery sparkling through his grizzled beard, he remains in constant, restless motion. 'I tried to pull the film the year after it was shot,' he says. 'I just suddenly wondered what I'd done. I had a camera on me at the most vulnerable time my life … I was going through a separation [he has two kids with French artist Delphine Ciampi], I'd been hooked on benzodiazepines for 10 years and I jumped off those. 'I had a breakdown after filming at the sanctuary and spent four months crawling around on my hands and knees eating peanut butter in an apartment, suicidal. I had to see a psychiatrist … The fact that the filming involved me being so personal was not part of my original thinking.' The trip to Ballarat to film his elderly parents and revisit scenes of his troubled early life had stirred some deeply buried trauma. In Kurzel and editor Nick Fenton's unwieldy final cut, those raw threads sit in jarring juxtaposition with the graphic horrors of animal trafficking in Indonesia. With its nod to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the idea of Ellis marching through the jungle with an enormous replica of Nina Simone's discarded chewing gum as a kind of totem of devotion — his book of 2021, Nina Simone's Gum, explains that obsession — looks decidedly unhinged. In the world of documentary filmmaking, he came to realise, such ideas are 'just a couple of pontoons you get to land on. And what happens swimming in between is anybody's guess. 'Music is like that, I find, in the studio. I've done enough of it to realise now a similarity. You can have an idea and when you get it done, it's really unfulfilling. Meanwhile, the stuff that you're not focusing on tends to develop of its own accord. 'These ideas Justin had, some were good. There's [unused] footage of me playing with Indonesian musicians and dancers and walking through the streets of Sovereign Hill and playing in paddocks full of cow shit and getting attacked by monkeys ... but the narrative, I think, only found itself in the editing.' And, ultimately, in the mind of the beholder. Ellis says he could only bear to watch the finished film once. In his reading, 'it's about this beautiful place that's being created in this community and about the good that people can do. 'Animals are like babies. They're born with their life, that's all they've got,' he says, dark eyes glistening. 'Most humans, we get a chance. We get some shot to make our destiny. Animals just have their life, and we need to stand up for them.' His life has been 'changed significantly', he says, by his dogs: a white German Shepherd and a Swiss Shepherd. 'Larry and Piglet. Piglet does therapy with me. They opened me up to something that feels like the closest thing to some sort of God – drawing the better qualities out of yourself, finding what's within you.' As awesome and humbling as it is, the Ellis Park sanctuary feels like an incredibly tenuous act of resistance against the overwhelming scale of the illegal wildlife trade: poaching, smuggling, habitat destruction, cruelty, corruption … But like hope itself, its existence is not negotiable. 'Hope is really fundamental,' Ellis says. 'At this point in my life, it feels like hanging onto hope is hanging onto life, and life is the greatest gift of all.' Loading It's a new way of thinking, he confesses, partly due to the unlikely intervention of a famous friend, Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers. 'He's an amazing human being. He's founded schools in Watts and Silver Lake,' Ellis says. 'When I was deciding this, it was not insubstantial expenditure for me and I called him, and he's like, 'Man, I encourage you to do this with all your heart. It'll open you up to something you never knew was possible'. 'The manager of a band I know, he's like, 'How much are the running costs?' I'm like, 'Dude, I don't f—ing know'. Now, probably a sensible person would have. But all my life it's been about not trying to understand too much. Just jumping. I mean, I was teaching and I gave it up to play in a band. I never really thought about the consequences.' For the sake of Ellis Park, its reluctant namesake has made his peace with the film that goes on general cinema release this week. 'What I love about the people there … they're being accountable for somebody else's actions, you know? That just feels to me fundamentally important. 'I've never wanted to tell my story, to sell my story. I don't feel like the world needs another boring musician's story,' he says, although these days, he admits, 'I do like reading some of them. I think there's just so many lives that are blown up to be something they aren't, and I didn't want to be adding to that. 'Justin really pushed me. He said, 'We can shoot it. We don't have to use it', and he allowed me to reclaim things, and in the space of that first day he became a true collaborator, like Nick or like [filmmaker colleague] Andrew Dominik: somebody you know has got you and that you can fail with. And it's OK. 'It's life. It's what happens. And I'm really grateful that it happened because it taught me I needed to confront stuff. I decided to go along with it the way I've always approached anything I do creatively. Just jump in.'
