Jeff Buckley's Mother Shares Why She Turned Down Brad Pitt's Grand Ideas For Musician's Biopic

Mary Guibert, the mother of the late musician Jeff Buckley, revealed that actor Brad Pitt once had dreams of depicting her son in a film based on his life. But that never happened because she had reservations about the project.

Guibert, in an interview with Variety, before her documenting screening at the Sundance Film Festival, called It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley,

shared how Pitt contacted her to become friends in 2000. He later asked for her blessing to bring Buckley's story to film.

Although she burned bright with the idea in the beginning, Guibert found herself doubting the project.

"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?" Guibert recalled asking Pitt. The exchange made her question the realism of such a depiction.

Pitt was not the only filmmaker who wanted to adapt Buckley's story to the screen. However, despite the skepticism of this project getting off the ground, Amy Berg, who directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Deliver Us from Evil, later tried to develop a narrative project about Buckley.

But she said she would do so with caution, worried she might associate with a project that might lack genuine understanding and sensitivity toward her son's legacy.

With access to Buckley's archives, however, Berg shifted from a scripted film to a documentary format. The docu, with Pitt as an executive producer and helping to preserve Buckley's belongings, opens on January 24.

Berg said, "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 co-produced the planned film Everybody Here Wants You with the late Scott Fagan in 2021, featuring actor Reeve Carney as Buckley. At that time, she assured fans that this version would do justice to her son's life and legacy.

Since then, though, we have not heard anything about it.

Raised by Guibert and his late folk musician father, Tim Buckley, Jeff first worked as a session musician before making his name in Manhattan's East Village. His 1994 debut album, Grace, was a critical and commercial failure at the time but has since been regarded as one of the best albums of the 1990s.

Tragically drowned, Buckley died in Memphis in 1997 at the age of 30.

While Guibert would not round up a second album while he was alive, he would later piece together his demo tapes into Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, which hit No. 64 on the Billboard 200 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the track "Everybody Here Wants You."

It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley hopes to tell a deeper story while paying homage to the complexity of his legacy.

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Jeff Buckley, Brad Pitt