Bad Seed turned good: Warren Ellis in the frame of wildlife doco
When Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel ran into a wild-looking musician in southern France, he heard a story so surprising that he vowed to make a documentary about it.
Stories are the lifeblood of the annual Cannes film festival. They are why people have been gathering in the French coastal city since 1946, to watch, discuss, critique and champion human stories captured on film for posterity and in turn to enlighten our understanding of ourselves.
In July 2021, Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel was in Cannes to promote Nitram, his gritty feature based on the twisted life path that led to the reprehensible actions of 1996 Port Arthur gunman Martin Bryant.
Musician Warren Ellis was there, too, to promote a film score he had co-composed with Nick Cave for The Velvet Queen, a French nature documentary that centred on attempts to find an elusive snow leopard in Tibet.
On bumping into one another at the film festival, the two old friends quickly reconnected and Kurzel asked a straightforward question: what had Ellis been up to during the Covid lockdowns?
Within the space of a few sentences, the filmmaker heard one of the wildest and most unusual tales to be floating anywhere near the French Riviera, even as the city’s population surged to the rhythm of a thousands-strong cast of professional storytellers.
The first bit was par for the course: with longtime collaborator Cave – in whose band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, he has performed since the mid-1990s – Ellis had scored some films and made some albums, including a 2021 duo release titled Carnage.
Oh, and he’d recently bought some land for a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra.
On hearing this, Kurzel was flummoxed for a moment, just as you’d be if one of your mates disclosed such an outlandish and unexpected thing. What?!
Ellis explained he hadn’t yet visited the property in western Indonesia owing to the pandemic, but he sketched out his loose plan to charter a boat that would take an 2.4m cast of Nina Simone’s chewing gum down a river, to arrive at the sanctuary for the first time and look upon the fruits of his surprising new partnership.
“It had this Fitzcarraldo-type feel about it,” Kurzel tells Review with a laugh, referring to the 1982 Werner Herzog feature notorious for having been plagued by thorny production issues.
“I just instantly went, ‘I’ve got to make a film about that’ – and he kept me to it. I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into,” the filmmaker says on a video call from New York late last month.
“But there was this weird pact; he looked me in the eye, and I looked him in the eye, and I knew that, because we’ve both got very busy lives, we’d really have to put time aside for it. That’s where it started, and then it just evolved.”
Moved by a stirring London concert performance in 1999 by Simone – who died in 2003, aged 70 – Ellis souvenired the American singer-songwriter’s discarded gum from her piano.
Over time, the chewy was elevated to a plane of transcendent, totemic power in his mind, and in 2021 the Bad Seed published an unusual mixed-media book about the saga – another Covid project for this restless creative soul, who was born in Ballarat in 1965 and first came to prominence as violinist in Melbourne-born instrumental rock trio Dirty Three.
That attention-grabbing detail of piloting a boat carrying the much-larger-than-life gum replica downriver in Sumatra certainly got Kurzel’s mind churning in Cannes, when they made that pact three years ago.
“But as the film [process] started, we realised that there was a pretension to that, that we perhaps weren’t so interested in; the gum got smaller and smaller,” says the filmmaker, whose previous features include Snowtown (2011), Assassin’s Creed (2016) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2019).
“In the end, it became this really humble piece about people, animals and creativity, and a whole lot of things. We just remained open to what the film was telling us and what it was wanting to be, rather than pushing all our thoughts and ideas on it – which is what we usually do.
“I have very particular ideas about directing films and I know Warren has [them] about making music; you have a particular vision,” Kurzel says.
“With this, in a weird way, we just left that aside, and really just opened our hearts a little to what would come, and what we felt like we wanted to talk about – but also, to be in the presence of these extraordinary people in Sumatra, and these incredible animals, and to really try to celebrate and take an audience through Warren’s point of view into that park, and learn and understand what’s extraordinary about it.”
The fruit of this collaboration, which marks Kurzel’s documentary debut, shares its name with the film’s ultimate locale: Ellis Park, which is the new land on which the Australian musician’s donation helped the non-profit Sumatra Wildlife Centre to extend its real estate footprint to allow the privacy required to successfully rehabilitate rescued wildlife caught up in Indonesia’s vast animal trafficking market.
The film will have its world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival this weekend, and its gently paced narrative – filmed across six to eight weeks in late 2022, according to 50-year-old Kurzel – travels from a visit to Ellis’s elderly parents in his home town of Ballarat to the titular Ellis Park, where the violinist meets the sanctuary’s Dutch-born founder, Femke den Haas, whose dedication to rescuing animals is both absolute and absolutely moving.
The subject of the film is a generous conversationalist, and he even manages to draw Kurzel into the camera’s lens on a couple of occasions, much to the filmmaker’s reluctance to let such appearances detract from the star of his show.
For Ellis is undoubtedly a star: one look at this bushy-bearded, besuited bloke and you’ll clock him as the living embodiment of comedian Billy Connolly’s desired state of appearing “windswept and interesting”. You simply can’t take your eyes off him, and the camera loves him, too, because his elegantly shaggy aesthetic is unique.
“He’s one of the best dressers I’ve come across; I’m always very envious of Warren’s outfits,” says Kurzel, chuckling.
“But he arrived in a suit and a pair of velvet shoes into Sumatra, and it was very interesting how he started to dismantle, and become this kid from Ballarat again. He was just in a pair of shorts, and his Hawaiian or fruit [themed] shirts, and then down to bare feet or thongs. It was really lovely seeing how that place and that environment had an effect on his style, as well, while he was over there – but he’s one of those guys that can pretty much put on anything and it looks pretty cool.”
To get caught up in such superficiality is a mistake, though, for Kurzel’s film pulses to the undeniable rhythm of a heartbeat that spurred den Haas to establish the wildlife sanctuary in 2019, and then Ellis to commit to parting with an undisclosed – but presumably significant – sum so they could continue their important work, which is volunteer-based and entirely reliant on donations.
To that end, Kurzel’s film is a gift that may prompt others to give in turn.
Not only is it a beautifully captured portrait of a unique figure on the Australian music landscape, it also shines an affecting spotlight on the shadowy underworld of animal trafficking and the remarkable people who seek to ease the suffering of creatures in harm, so they might be rehabilitated enough to return to the wild – or else live out the rest of their days in calm comfort, surrounded by caring humans, having endured distressing traumas of parental separation, injury and abuse along the way.
“They’re incredibly unselfish people,” Kurzel says of the sanctuary’s volunteers. “They’ve just completely and utterly dedicated their lives to this place, and to these animals. They’re incredibly skilled and energetic, and very sophisticated in the way they handle the animals; very intuitive in understanding and knowing straightaway what an animal is experiencing.
“They’re also dealing with a lot of trauma; they’re seeing pretty awful things, and then they’re having to encourage trust in those animals again.
“We just saw them as superstars, really. I’d never really met a group of people like them. They’re like a band; they were so close, they knew what each other was doing, and there was incredible camaraderie between them – and when Warren arrived, you could just tell they instantly connected. It’s no surprise that Warren’s part of this; they all had a very similar spirit.”
The titular subject, meanwhile, is full of praise for Kurzel’s work. “I’m very happy and proud of the film,” Ellis, 59, tells Review via email. “Justin was the only person who [could] have directed this film. I trusted him and the process. It was quite a profound experience for me.”
Ellis Park will premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Saturday, August 10, followed by a limited screening run; its full cinematic release has not yet been announced. To donate: ellispark.org
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