Los Angeles music obsessive Amy Berg still remembers what it was like to be a Jeff Buckley fan back in her twenties. “Grace” “changed my life,” she told me during a recent interview. “I would see every single heavy grunge punk band that came through Los Angeles: I was at Nirvana’s first show in L.A. at Jabberjaw. When I heard this album, it settled me. It was OK to be in your body, but Jeff made it all OK to feel.”
“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley,” the latest documentary from Berg, is not as dark as her exposés “Deliver Us from Evil” (2006), “West of Memphis” (2012), and “An Open Secret” (2014), or her definitive Janis Joplin portrait, “Janis: Little Girl Blue” (2015).
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Mostly, it’s a celebration of Buckley’s life and music, primarily the only album he ever released, “Grace,” in 1994, lauded by David Bowie as one of ten LPs he would take with him to a desert island. Three years later, after non-stop touring, in May of 1997, just as Buckley was bringing his band in to record his second album, he accidentally drowned in Memphis’ Wolf River. He was fully clothed, with one beer in his system. He was 30 years old.
Ever since her movie “Deliver Us from Evil” came out in 2006, Berg has been trying to make a Buckley film. But it took until 2019 for his mother Mary Guilbert to be ready to participate with Berg.
What changed? “Trust, and she was actually ready at that moment,” said Berg. “Getting older and wanting to make sure the story is told properly was important to her. Legacy, and she knew I wanted final cut, and she would have to basically turn the keys over to me. So that took a while.”
Once Guilbert came on as executive producer, her archives disgorged never-before-seen cassette tapes, photos, journals, footage, home movies, audio recordings of conversations, and voice messages. After Buckley’s death, Brad Pitt footed the bill to restore, digitize, and preserve the entire Buckley archive. There was talk of developing a movie, which never came to pass. (Hence a producing credit for his production company Plan B. The film’s active producers are Berg’s Disarming Films, Topic Studios, and Fremantle.)
To assemble animation montages and showcase much of the archive material, Berg relied on “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” Icelandic director and artist Sara Gunnarsdóttir (“My Year of Dicks”). “We met up in the beginning and dreamed it up together, watching old ’90s videos and finding all the right textures and colors and tones,” said Berg. “I wanted it to be balanced enough that you could get in his head and live there comfortably, but not keep coming out of the film. He was stimulated on lots of different levels at all times.”
Berg spent years talking to people who knew Buckley well, including two of his romantic partners, musicians Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser. (A third, Liz Frazier, refused to be interviewed.) “Neither of them really wanted to talk,” said Berg. “It took a long time to establish trust with everybody. So Rebecca never has spoken publicly about this at all. Joan very minimally. It was about making sure that it was going to be told properly, and they knew their version of Jeff. And obviously everyone had a different version of Jeff. I tried to find the middle of that with everybody.”
Alas, Hal Wilner died during the pandemic before Berg could put him on video. Wilner had produced a tribute concert to Buckley’s father Tim, a ’60s folk-rocker who died of a heroin overdose in 1975, that broke Jeff out as a major discovery. Wilner and Jeff became close. Jeff had a tricky relationship with a father, who had abandoned him more than once.
This may have been a factor in Jeff’s mental stability in the three years of endless touring before his death. “Contextually, in the ’90s, therapy wasn’t an everyday thing,” said Berg. “But he was showing signs that he needed support and infrastructure, some love, some safety nets. He needed that at that time in his life. He moved to Memphis from New York, and was all alone, and clearly was going through a lot. Today there would be more of a warning light going off in that situation. I don’t think that has much to do with his death. It’s about all the mystery and tragedy that surrounds a person like Jeff and somebody who has this mythological presence, even many years after he’s died.”
Buckley made his name performing at Sin-é, the tiny East Village venue where he was discovered. He also recorded a cover version in 1991 of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” which kept being sampled and played and eventually kept reappearing on Billboard charts years later, after his death.
Of course, Berg did her own archive hunting and interviews. Berg’s favorite archive discovery was tipped by Ben Harper: low res hot air balloon footage from the Eurockeenes festival on the French/Swiss border. And even though Buckley never produced his second album, Chris Cornell helped Guilbert to produce the album “Sketches from ‘My Sweetheart the Drunk,’” which Berg includes on the film’s soundtrack.
“It didn’t have Jeff’s final mark on it, obviously,” she said. “They were just demos, but you can hear the songs, they’re amazing, and it’s too bad that he didn’t get that one to the finish line.”
The bottom line: a theatrical release will heighten awareness of Buckley’s music. “I never have had a film where there was so much excitement for the theatrical release,” said Berg. “There’s pre-sales and sold-out screenings already. We’ll see if that translates to butts into seats. There’s a moment in indie film right now where there’s a lot of cool films and theaters, and people are going, if not in huge numbers. With everything that’s going on with the streamers these days, it feels like there’s a nice pocket for indie film.”
Next up: Berg is profiling the late musician Chris Cornell, who appears in “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.”
A Magnolia Pictures release, “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” is in theaters now.
