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“Like a Knife to the Stomach”: Amy Berg on the Singer’s Relationships in ‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’ 

By Ishita Sengupta


Still image of Jeff Buckley, holding a microphone.

Jeff Buckley. Image credit: Merri Cyr. Courtesy of Sundance Institute


For 15 years, Amy Berg wanted to make a film on Jeff Buckley. The musician’s mother, Mary Guibert, was initially hesitant. A potential biopic starring Brad Pitt fell through in the early 2000s (when Buckley passed, the actor paid for restoring and digitizing Buckley’s archive, and is credited as an executive producer on It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley). In 2012, Guibert shared the intimate voice messages her son left for her with Berg, but only gave the approval to use them in 2019. The project started out as a narrative feature till it became the stirring documentary, It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley. According to Berg, the merits of the archives—“they were so good”—convinced her that it had to be nonfiction. 

If It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley stemmed from Berg’s abiding love for the artist, she has also designed it as a love story. The film includes Buckley’s former lovers and musicians, Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser, and completes the circle with Guibert giving insights into their complicated mother-son relationship. Their observations stitch together an empathetic portrait of a radical artist whose eclectic taste ranged from Led Zeppelin to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who soared until he could not feel the ground beneath his feet, and who loved others but could not love himself.

In a strict sense, It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a straightforward fan service that chooses to cover the entirety of Buckley’s short life—faithfully touching upon the volatile relationship he shared with his father Tim Buckley, and his thorny connection with fame—rather than probing into one singular incident. Even his contentious death at the age of 30 by drowning is outlined without provocation. The film cites the autopsy report that stated that Buckley had only beer in his system. 

The joy of watching It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley then resides in witnessing Berg’s commitment to telling a known story and using rare archives, of the singer’s aching voice in elaborate voice messages he sent his loved ones. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and after, Berg spoke to me about the making of the documentary and whether her love for the artist altered in the process. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

DOCUMENTARY: Jeff Buckley is one of those artists who continues to be relevant for what his songs mean to people. What were your reasons for making the documentary on him?

AMY BERG: Jeff Buckley got me through a lot of stuff in my 20s. I used to be a punk rock booking agent at a record label and it was a very angry time. You know, I did not set out to be a filmmaker. I love making films but even after Deliver Us from Evil [2006, Berg’s debut film], I was unsure about continuing. But the dream of making a film on Jeff Buckley kept me going for all these years. I found his mother at some point and then they asked me to make a biopic on him. But the wealth of the archive convinced me that it would make a much stronger documentary. In the last 15 years, whenever I finished a film, I reached out to check if she was ready yet. In 2019 she finally agreed. 

D: When you make a documentary on an artist you admire so much, don’t you run the risk of discovering something uncomplimentary in the process that can change your relationship with them?

AB: Or they become too real. 

D: Exactly. The aura diminishes and they are reduced to a person. Given the access you had, was that ever a fear?

AB: The fear might have been there but it never happened. Even with the darkness with him, I just wanted to give him a hug. His story is so complicated but he is such a good person. People loved him for who he was. 

D: Did the fact that his mother was actively involved in this intervene in your process?

AB: I am a single mother and I was interested in Guibert’s relationship with Buckley, which was complicated and complex. She gave me keys to the storage but she did not see the final cut. When I asked her questions, she gave me insights to stories which helped me understand him better, but that was the extent of it. As a filmmaker I have evolved and in this film, I learned how to create emotional tension that isn’t a crying release but more like an insulation between the story and the emotions of the story. I am a big crybaby, but I wanted people to feel this film strongly. The only part where I cry is at that moment when Buckley meets Nusrat Fateh Ali and he finds a way to talk to him by singing. 

D: When we like an artist we also tend to protect them. I felt that in one scene where he was singing at a concert meant as a tribute to his father in 1991. It was Buckley’s first public performance in New York and we hear Moore say that the singer was very tense but there was no footage. Was it deliberate?

AB: I promise you if I had any recording it would be there in the film. It was a bummer to me because it was such an important moment in his career and nobody had any footage. I don’t know why. I slimmed it down because I felt like I was cheating but I found a way to evoke the feeling through animation. 

D: This makes me curious about your use of animation. What was the reason behind the style?

AB: I have a hard time with animation because I feel it takes you out of the story. In this film, I didn’t want to come up with full animation so we thought of little subtle ways which were not traditional. I worked with Sara Gunnarsdóttir (My Year of Dicks, 2022) and it was wonderful. 

D: This is your second film on an artist after Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015) on Janis Joplin. Your last series, Phoenix Rising (2022), looked at Evan Rachel Wood’s abuse by Marilyn Manson. In your filmography, there is an inclination to look at people haunted by their past. In this film, Tim Buckley’s early abandonment of his son keeps coming up. Did you see Jeff Buckley as someone held hostage to their past?

AB: To me, there is no other way of looking at Buckley except that he was abandoned by his father and that he chose the same career and every time he was introduced as Tim Buckley’s son, it was like a knife to his stomach. That was with him all the time.


Ishita Sengupta is an independent film critic and culture writer from India. Her writing is informed by gender and pop culture and has appeared in The Indian Express, Hyperallergic, and New Lines Magazine.