Australian musician and composer Warren Ellis has always been an artist that has intuitively followed the road wherever it’s taken him. Right now that’s Toronto, Canada as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds continue a world tour in support of last year’s acclaimed Wild God album.
The road has taken Ellis, 60, to some pretty interesting places throughout his life, including to an animal sanctuary in Sumatra, Indonesia that he co-founded with animal rights activist Femke den Haas.
New documentary Ellis Park, from Snowtown and True History of the Kelly Gang director Justin Kurzel, is named after the sanctuary, which rehabilitates trafficked and abused wildlife. The film (out June 26th in NSW; elsewhere June 12th), started out as a way to document Ellis’s first visit to the park, but it soon evolved into a personal study of his life and artistry — something he initially found incredibly confronting, leading to a “massive breakdown” he says took six months to recover from.
“It was more personal than I anticipated… I freaked out when it was edited and [I watched it],” Ellis says from a Toronto hotel room.
Touching upon a troubled childhood growing up in Ballarat, Victoria and his drug addiction later in life, Ellis says that he initially tried to pull the film from release.
“I sent it to Nick [Cave] and [director] Andrew Dominik and [Dirty Three bandmates] Jim White and Mick Turner, as well as my girlfriend, and I got their thoughts on it, particularly the personal stuff, which created problems within my family,” he says. “Eventually I said ‘fuck it,’ but the first time I saw it in Melbourne was terrifying, because there was a thousand people there. It’s one thing to look at somebody else’s life up there, but when it’s your own, and it goes into some stuff that I’d only just started coming to terms with personally, it’s something else. I was so rattled by the whole thing and felt like I’d let the world into the back door.”
He pauses, the night in question clearly playing back in his mind.
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“And then I just thought, ‘Who gives a fuck, anyway,’ you know? I gave the director his vision, and I didn’t want to get in the way of that. With all the stuff I’ve done with music, I’ve tried to be as honest as I can. So, I decided to live by my own words. I think it’s a better film for the fact that it’s honest and I haven’t decided to shut things down because they made me feel uncomfortable.”
Ellis has nothing but praise for director Justin Kurzel, who realised Ellis was at a pivotal moment in his life and would make the perfect subject for a documentary.
“Justin was amazing. We didn’t really know each other, but I came out of that loving him like any other close friend that I have,” he says. “It was an extraordinary creative collaboration with him, and I couldn’t have done that with just anybody. He knew what to do with me. When we finished it, he said to me, ‘I want to tell you, I’ve pushed you as hard on this as any actor I’ve ever worked with.’ It was an incredible gift for me, just on a personal level, to have gone through that with him and to have been pushed to the outer limits.”
Besides providing a vulnerable insight into Ellis’s life — he says the film shoot was like “40 years of therapy in three days” — the film’s other key focus is Ellis Park and the incredible work of Femke den Haas and her team of conservationists. The dedicated animal rights activists literally put their life on the line — they’ve been shot at several times — to save illegally trafficked animals and nurse them back to health.
“I believe in the place [Ellis Park], I believe that we need to help animals and I believe that if we don’t speak up for them, nobody will,” says Ellis. “Animals are very much like babies. Babies are really defenceless, and with an animal, all it’s got is its life — it comes into the world with that, and we try to take it away from it.
“The people I work with at the centre there, Femke and the whole team, are just amazing. They’re the reason that the park exists — because these people are taking responsibility for other people’s shortcomings and mistakes and fuck ups. And I find it incredibly inspiring to see people take it upon themselves to correct a wrong that they haven’t even implemented themselves.”
Ellis’s love for animals runs deep, with him crediting a dog his girlfriend bought him as bringing him back from the brink post-filming breakdown.
“This dog has shown me unconditional love, and that changed my life,” he says. “I’ve always loved animals, but this dog, literally every morning, makes me find my better self. When I’m on tour, I just miss her so much.
“Having children opened me up to something I never knew existed, and animals can do that too — they can open you up to things within you that I don’t think anything else can. Maybe it is just opening yourself to unconditional love; a kind of universal love or the very nature of what love can be. And if you can project that love towards something every day, we’ve got a chance of changing things, I think.”
This Warren Ellis interview features in the June-August 2025 issue of Rolling Stone AU/NZ. If you’re eager to get your hands on it, then now is the time to sign up for a subscription.
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