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Jeff Buckley.
(Photo by gie knaeps/getty imagesThe mother of the deceased musician Jeff Buckleywho drowned in the Wolf River in May 1997 had a good reason to reject Brad Pitt’s Request to play the singer-songwriter in a biopic years ago.
“We are going to paint your hair, place brown contact lenses on those baby blues and you will open your mouth and the voice of Jeff will come true?” a skeptical Mary Gibert told Variety Van de Ster published in an interview on Saturday, January 25.
Despite the fact that Pitt Guibert invited for his wedding for ex-wife Jennifer AnistonGuibert would not admit. The couple kept talking about the possibility of a film about the life of Buckley, and with the help of director Amy BergEventually ended up in the best way to pay tribute to the deceased musician: a documentary.
“Once I started listening to his voicemail messages and read his DAP player and demos and his magazines, I just couldn’t imagine that it was anything but a documentary,” Berg explained to the outlet. “And I just didn’t know how to replicate Jeff in that script feeling.”
The result is the documentary It’s never over, Jeff BuckleyThat on Friday, January 24, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2025.
The son of Guibert and musician Tim BuckleyHe left when his son was six months old and later died of an overdose of drugs at the age of 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 for the overwhelming praise of fans and musicians he admired to deal with, like his idol Bob Dylan.
His death three years later, as Variety put it, was “dressed in mystery.” Rolling stone published an investigation In what went wrong that night, but the autopsy results of Buckley did not contain something that Berg believes “contributed to the inheritance that Jeff probably has overdose”. Instead, the singer drowned because of the strong undertaking of the massive river.
“One of the great things by Jeff Buckley is that you discover him when you are the intention to discover it,” Berg also said about the singer, who is perhaps still best known for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
“He had definitely had 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 definitely has a moment in the history of pop culture.”