For more than two decades, filmmakers have followed the story of Jeff Buckley, one of the most talented and promising musicians of his generation, who drowned in the Memphis River in May 1997 at the age of 30.
In 2000, Brad Pitt courted Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, invited her to lunch at his home in Los Feliz, and added her to the list of VIP guests at his wedding to Jennifer Aniston. It didn’t take much arm-twisting before she gave the actor permission to film a biopic about her son, the tortured singer-songwriter who famously performed the greatest-ever version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
“If 20 people were calling you, and Brad Pitt was one of them, who would you choose to go see?” Guibert says with a laugh.
But Guibert was skeptical about the idea of Pitt, or any other actor, playing her only child.
“We’ll dye your hair, put brown contact lenses on those blue ones, and you’ll open your mouth and Jeff’s voice will come out?” Pete asked.
However, she and Pitt have kept in touch about a potential project. In the following years, director Amy Berg, best known for her Oscar-nominated documentaries “West of Memphis” and “Deliver Us from Evil,” made her feature debut. She was interested in moving from nonfiction to narrative stories for the Buckley Project. But that also gave Guibert pause.
“I didn’t feel safe being in a situation where someone was learning on the job,” she says.
Fortunately, Berg simultaneously had an epiphany after Guibert granted her access to her son’s archive: only a documentary could do Buckley justice. Thus Berg turned to “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” which Pitt executive produced. The documentary will have its world premiere at Sundance on January 24.
“Once I started listening to his voicemails, his DAP player, his demos, and reading his diaries, I couldn’t imagine it was just a documentary,” Berg says. “And I didn’t know how you could imitate Jeff in that written sense.”
After all, Buckley was an enigma. Born and raised in Orange County, California, he is the son of jazz and folk star Tim Buckley. But the elder Buckley abandoned his child before he was born, and they only met once. Tim Buckley died of a heroin overdose at the age of 28 in 1975.
Like his father, Jeff Buckley died long before he reached his full potential. He enjoyed a meteoric rise, playing in New York clubs like CBGB before landing a blockbuster deal with Columbia Records. But Guibert says her son never embraced fame, and was terrified of being chosen on People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful list. At the same time, the pressure to follow up on his only album — 1994’s “Grace,” hailed by Bob Dylan and David Bowie as one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time — was sometimes insurmountable. He came to hate the Columbia executives who pushed for a second album before it was ready, pushing him to the point of a brief psychotic break.
“It’s Never Over” helps correct many misconceptions about Jeff Buckley while contextualizing his artistic accomplishments. Although his career was short, it is far from forgettable. He and his original guitar playing have been discovered by a new generation – an analogue celebrity in the digital world.
“One of the great things about Jeff Buckley is that you discover him when you’re supposed to discover him,” Berg says. “He’s definitely had a huge impact on TikTok, where I was surprised to see that he has a bigger following on the Jeff Buckley hashtag than even Bob Dylan. He’s definitely having another moment in pop culture history.”