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.'
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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.'
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