NEED TO KNOW
- Jeff Buckley’s life and career will be analyzed in the upcoming documentary, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley
- Never-before-seen footage and home videos are featured in the film directed by Amy Berg
- It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, premiered at Sundance and hits theaters in August
Jeff Buckley’s enigmatic life and career is front and center in this new film.
The trailer for the documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, was released on Wednesday, July 16 and gives fans an intimate look at the singer’s life and career, which was cut short.
“How would you like your fans to think of you?” an off-camera voice asks the late musician in the trailer. “Just the music,” the musician responds in a candid and now-haunting manner. “Because when I’m dead, that’s the only thing that’ll be around.”
At another point in the trailer, Buckley, who died in 1997 at 30 after drowning in a Memphis river, is asked, “Where would you like to see yourself in 10 years?” An answer is never revealed in the clip.
The trailer features never-before-seen archival footage and home videos from Buckley’s life. Those interviewed for the documentary include his mother, Mary Guibert, along with former partners Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser.
Former bandmates, including Michael Tighe and Parker Kindred, also participated in the film.
“I’ve been wrong, and completely ugly, I’ve been beautiful, I’ve been totally in love, I’ve been hideous, but I’ve never been dead,” Buckley says in voiceover at another part of the poignant trailer.
Directed by Amy Berg and with the help of Guibert, the documentary came to be after there were talks of it being a narrative film starring Brad Pitt 25 years earlier.
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“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,” Guibert told Variety in January.
“I just didn’t know how you could kind of replicate Jeff in that scripted sense.”
Academy Award nominee Berg, 54, meanwhile, said that the singer is having “another moment in pop culture history.”
“One of the great things about Jeff Buckley is you discover him when you’re meant to discover him,” Berg said to Variety. “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.”
Buckley was born in 1966 in California. His father, folk musician Tim Buckley, died in 1975 from a heroin overdose.
His star began to rise in New York City’s avant-garde club in the 1990s. He was a session musician when he signed with Columbia and released his only album, Grace, in 1994. His cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” was also a highlight of his career.
He was working on his second record, My Sweetheart the Drunk, at the time of his death. It was released as a compilation titled Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk in 1998. The album received a Grammy nomination in the Best Male Rock Vocal Performance category for “Everybody Here Wants You.”
The documentary made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley will be released in theaters Aug. 8. It will be available to stream on HBO Max in the winter as part of Bill Simmons’ Music Box series.
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