By Yasmeen Serhan
Some artists become timeless because their work transcends eras, resonating with new generations long after their time; others are immortalized because their lives — and careers — ended far too soon. Jeff Buckley, whose ethereal voice and singular 1994 album “Grace” earned him cult status before his accidental drowning at the age of 30, occupies both categories.
Nearly three decades since his passing, audiences now have the opportunity to rediscover Buckley. In “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” filmmaker Amy Berg excavates the life and legacy of the singer, drawing on rare archival material and the intimate recollections of the women who knew him best, including his mother, Mary Guibert, as well as his former partners and bandmates.
“I don’t think that there’s any one version of the Jeff Buckley story … but this is the one I chose to tell,” says Berg, whose efforts to make this film — the first to involve the cooperation of the singer’s estate — were more than a decade in the making. Speaking with Reuters from Los Angeles in the run up to the film’s August 8 release, she discusses why Buckley’s voice still resonates today, the challenge of disentangling myth from man, and what his story reveals about the pressures of stardom — and whether we’ve gotten better at recognizing when young artists need help.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Reuters: To start, can you tell the story of how this film came together, nearly 30 years after Buckley’s death?
Amy Berg: I was very moved by his album, “Grace.” It came at a time when music was very grungy and heavy and aggressive and very male. I heard this album and it just opened me up. I had all the feels. I loved “Grace,” I loved Jeff Buckley. And then just a couple of years later, he passed away while he was making his second album.
I’ve stayed with this album — it stayed with me, I should say — and just watched how his popularity has actually gone up. It seems like every generation, he has a whole bunch of new followers, and it’s kind of an unusual phenomenon to just have made one album and be bigger today than he was back in the ‘90s. I’ve been wanting to tell his story since then.
A couple of projects have been done on Buckley’s story. How does this one differ?
There has only really been one BBC special that was about him after he died and there was a scripted film that was made about his father (folk rock musician Tim Buckley) that he had a small role (in), but the estate didn’t participate in that. So this is really the first time they’ve ever participated in a film. There are a couple of projects, I believe, that almost happened, but didn’t. So this was the only official documentary about Jeff.
You’ve explored the lives of iconic musicians before — I’m thinking, in particular, of your documentary on Janis Joplin. What draws you to these stories?
I wanted to make the Jeff Buckley film back in 2010. I didn’t get the rights at the time. I was up for the Janis Joplin gig and I went in and met with the family, and I think I did that film as an answer to not being able to make the Jeff Buckley film at the time. But it’s good that it happened that way because I learned a lot making the Janis film, about the process of making a music documentary. There’s just so much to it. It’s dense. There’s just a lot of rights involved. There’s archive. You have to scour for material. And you have to take on the responsibility of making sure that you get it right because the person is not around to justify or verify things.
It was fascinating to hear Buckley narrate parts of his life throughout the film. What kind of source material were you working with?
I started reviewing the archive in 2019, which was an interesting moment. It was towards the end of Trump’s presidency, but there was a big women’s march movement and the language was very specific. And as I started listening to Jeff speak, I noticed what a feminist he was and I noticed that he had this cultural language of our time back in the ‘90s. He really was tapped into something before his time because the music business was so patriarchal at the time. That really spoke to me, and so I decided to tell the story through the women in his life … and to try to understand who he was to them, because I just thought that was the right way to tell his story.
You mention how Buckley’s fame has only grown since his passing. How did you navigate telling the story of the myth versus the man?
That was definitely something that I did struggle with because I had a certain impression of him, and I did not want to make a hagiographical film. I wanted to make an honest film and I wanted to show him as a human with all of his tricky, complicated personality. I just wanted to make sure that I got him right and I showed him with warts and all, let’s say. — Reuters
