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The documentary Ellis Park follows musician Warren Ellis from regional Victoria, where he faces his childhood trauma, to a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra. By Kirsten Krauth.

Violinist Warren Ellis is confronting his demons

Violinist and composer Warren Ellis.

Credit: Matthew Thorne

In conversation, Warren Ellis speaks like he plays the violin: freewheeling, often taking flight for long periods and then circling back to land. After touring the United States with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, he’s back in Australia to talk about Ellis Park, director Justin Kurzel’s first feature documentary, which traces Ellis’s childhood in Ballarat, regional Victoria, and his recent passion project, the setting up of an animal sanctuary and rehabilitation centre in Sumatra.

We meet in a hotel in South Yarra, Ellis decked out in signature brown suit and bling, with shiny, burgundy, pointy shoes that could take an eye out. He’s never still, stroking his beard, slumping in his seat, animated suddenly and leaning forward to make a point: a bundle of energy with a whirling mind.

In 2020, Femke den Haas, a Dutch-born paramedic veterinary nurse, persuaded him to support her wildlife refuge in Indonesia. He encountered her during the first lockdown after working on music for a French documentary, La panthère des neiges (The Velvet Queen), about the rare snow leopard. He was thinking of a way to give back. “My creative life has been very kind to me, I’ve been able to live basically off my work,” he says. “Within the space of 30 seconds, I just couldn’t believe this woman, like she was just so devoted to what she was doing.”

When they first met online, den Haas’s living arrangements and the sanctuary’s conditions were hard-going and rudimentary. “They had a metal packing crate that was the hospital, and it was 50 degrees in there, and they’d been set up in a car park living there for a couple of years, her and her husband.” He smiles. “It was kind of like being an indie band in the ’90s, it reminded me of Dirty Three, just running on the smell of an oily rag.”

He was so touched by den Haas’s dedication and the images of rescued animals that he committed to helping them to buy land. After a call-out on social media, den Haas built a school, a veterinary hospital, animal enclosures and a garden, which they named Ellis Park. Ellis didn’t meet den Haas until later, when he went to Sumatra with the documentary team to visit the park. “It was all done virtually and it required a lot of trust and a lot of care, which is at the heart of this,” he says. “It’s been an extraordinary experience for me, something I didn’t anticipate. It opened my heart to something new.”

For Kurzel, making a documentary with Ellis was a terrifying experience. He was used to working with actors and scripts for films and television shows – The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Nitram, True History of the Kelly Gang – but this project had no clear direction.

The director was attracted initially to the idea because of a sculpture of chewing gum. In Ellis’s memoir, Nina Simone’s Gum, he describes a rapturous moment of taking Nina Simone’s gum off the piano after her performance. He later had the gum cast in various metals and reproduced on a larger scale. After unsuccessfully approaching the Louvre and the Smithsonian, he hopes to put a replica in Ellis Park.

He and Kurzel initially planned to make a three-metre-high piece of gum in marble, sail it in a boat up the river in Indonesia and drag it to the top of the hill. “Justin’s seen Fitzcarraldo and filmmakers get excited about that,” Ellis says. “And then a month later, I got this synopsis.” In one of the documentary’s funnier moments, Ellis is leaving the park after sad goodbyes but yells for the filmmakers to stop the car – he’s forgotten to give den Haas the gum. “This is one of the interesting things in the film, the big idea [of the gum] just disappears totally out of it.”

Despite a very public life, Ellis is a private person. He wasn’t interested in being the star of a documentary or in telling his life story. “It is problematic, because you have to choose an angle and it’s either heroic or it’s humble,” he says. “I’ve always felt rather lucky that I don’t write words, so I’m not misunderstood … working with Nick Cave, he’d write the lyrics and he was responsible for all the discussion, but I could just sit there and operate in that world but not have to take any of the heat for anything … I had this free, creative rein.”

One of the key elements of Kurzel’s synopsis for the documentary – which Ellis confesses he didn’t read – was heading to Ellis’s home town, Ballarat. It was a place the musician didn’t want to return to, where he would be forced to confront many of his childhood fears.

“I just said to him in the car, ‘Look, I can’t go back’ and he was like, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘I have a very complex relationship with my mother’, which was something I couldn’t talk about at the time. For me to kind of step into my private world felt like, I guess, a betrayal … it just felt against the grain of what I’d been about.”

Although he was a professional musician and had played on many of the world’s stages, Ellis said that every time he drove to Ballarat, he “became this little kid again … It was really crippling and so I avoided it.”

In the end, Kurzel persuaded Ellis to return. One of the documentary’s most moving scenes is when Ellis visits his parents. In their late 80s at the time of filming, his father has cancer and his mother dementia. The family home and backyard look like they might not have changed much since Ellis was a child: photos of him as a teenager sit in frames around the lounge room. His father, a songwriter and musician from way back who taught him the joys of the creative process, plays a tune he composed while Ellis backs him on fiddle. His father then reads aloud a section of Nina Simone’s Gum, his face alight, which describes his hidden musical life, a box put away on a shelf holding an unreleased record.

For Ellis, the timing of his visit was crucial. “I didn’t realise that it would be the last time,” he says. “Within a week, Mum was in a home with advanced dementia, where she’s remained.”

Three days in Ballarat felt like 50 years of therapy. “I had this camera on me at this incredibly vulnerable time in my life,” he says. “My mother had been violent on us as kids and I never knew why.” He describes hiding in cupboards, feeling scared and wanting to escape Ballarat, playing music as a way of dealing with emotional pain.

Witnessing his mother’s illness was transformative. “So many people have [dementia], but we just don’t talk about it … and for me, for the first time, I was able to feel compassion for my mother, such an incredible gift. And Justin made me reclaim things.” His visit also gave him the chance to take care of his father for a month, away from the camera. “I sat and talked to him like I’d never spoken to him before,” he says. “That was incredible for me because it answered a lot of questions that have just hounded me all my life, you know?” His father died in December 2023.

In the film, Ellis plays violin in various Ballarat locations – the Statuary Pavilion in the botanical gardens, the church he attended 40 years ago, the same Regent Cinemas where I watch him do a Q&A. Ellis describes the visit with Kurzel as an “exorcism of sorts”. But the complex family undercurrents thrown up for Ellis – a lifetime of trauma for him and his father – reverberate beyond the documentary. “Stuff that I didn’t address in the film because I didn’t know how to,” says Ellis. “I was going through a separation, my family life was falling apart … I’d been hooked on benzodiazepine for 10 years.”

After filming in Ballarat and Sumatra, the documentary was put on hold for a year. “Basically, what happens in-between the two sections of the film is, I had a nervous breakdown, went down a wormhole, had to get psychiatric help,” he says. “You can only put shit behind you for so long and it builds up and then there’s a tsunami of shit that’s going to fall on you. And that’s what happened.” He smiles, quick to turn the conversation around. “There’s always another rock bottom below the rock bottom you’ve been at, you know, and for me, they’re positive signs.”

Ellis says that Kurzel asked him to play violin in the Ballarat spaces where he felt safe as a child and when he returned, he felt a sense of peace. The documentary’s editor, Nick Fenton, beautifully juxtaposes these moments with the animals in the park finding sanctuary in the care of their handlers. Ellis says that Kurzel, who didn’t know him when they began filming, treated him like an actor. “When we finished, Justin goes, ‘I want you to know I pushed you as hard as any actor I’ve pushed in my life … And I want to thank you for trusting me.’ ”

After Ellis’s breakdown, which is not recorded, the documentary moves to his studio in Paris, where he’s filmed making the music that becomes the film’s soundtrack. Drawing together the musical threads that have been seeded throughout the film, starting in the jungle with the sounds of birds and monkeys, reveals Ellis’s talent for the layering of sounds that mark his compositions and the profound influence of his music on the work of Nick Cave.

Talking in the film about his band Dirty Three, Ellis mentions the importance of “little ideas that could build something emotionally; it was dynamic, could fall apart at any minute, it was really thrilling.” There is a sense of this thrill, this childlike wonder, whenever he is composing – a place of meditation where the outside world stops.

In the film’s most powerful scene, Ellis’s soundtrack truly comes to the fore. When den Haas invites him to help release an eagle into the wild, he initially refuses, saying it makes him feel awkward, as if he’s cutting a ribbon. “I don’t want to be that guy.” Den Haas persuades him to take part and here it’s his music that lifts the scene to something extraordinary. His song soars with the birds as the workers shed tears of relief each time an eagle flies off into the sky, a symbol of the power of freedom and compassion.

While for Ellis the film brought a personal awakening, he wants the ongoing conversation to be about the park, its animals and the work den Haas does with her team. Watching with an audience might be difficult for Ellis, but discussions about the film have meant growth, “a big shift in me, fundamentally”.

I ask him whether key aspects, such as connecting with his father and his childhood, would have happened if the documentary hadn’t been made. He says probably not.

“It was way more than just shooting, what I thought we were gonna do. It became a very profound experience for me.” He pauses for a rare moment. “Life-changing.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 11, 2025 as "Parking the demons".

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