The mother of the late musician Jeff Buckley, who drowned in the Wolf River in May 1997, had a good reason to turn down Brad Pitt’s request to play the singer-songwriter in a biopic years ago.
“We’re going to dye your hair, put brown contact lenses on those baby blues, and you’re going to open your mouth and Jeff’s voice is going to come out?” a skeptical Mary Guibert told Variety of the star in an interview published on Saturday, January 25.
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Despite the fact that Pitt invited Guibert to his wedding to ex-wife Jennifer Aniston, Guibert wouldn’t budge. The pair kept speaking about the possibility of a film about Buckley’s life, and with the help of director Amy Berg, eventually landed on the best way to pay tribute to the late musician: a documentary.
“Once I started listening to his voicemail messages and his DAP player and demos and reading his journals, I just couldn’t imagine it being anything but a documentary,” Berg explained to the outlet. “And I just didn’t know how you could kind of replicate Jeff in that scripted sense.”
The result is the documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Friday, January 24.
The son of Guibert and musician Tim Buckley, who left when his son was six months old and later died of a drug overdose at age 28, the younger Buckley signed a three-album deal with Columbia Records in 1992 for almost $1 million. He released his only record, Grace, in 1994 but struggled to handle the overwhelming praise from fans and musicians he admired, like his idol Bob Dylan.
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His death three years later was, as Variety put it, “shrouded in mystery.” Rolling Stone published an investigation into what went wrong that night but failed to include Buckley’s autopsy results, something that Berg believes “contributed to the legacy that Jeff probably overdosed.” Instead, the singer drowned due to the massive river’s strong undertow.
“One of the great things about Jeff Buckley is you discover him when you’re meant to discover him,” Berg also said of the singer, who is still perhaps best known for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
“He has definitely made a big impact on TikTok, where I was surprised to see that he has more followers on the Jeff Buckley hashtag than even Bob Dylan,” she continued. “He’s definitely having another moment in pop culture history.”
