“It’s never over: Jeff Buckley”, interview with director Amy Berg

Following its success at the Sundance Festival and the Rome Film Festival, “It’s never over: Jeff Buckley” comes to Italian cinemas as a special event, only on March 16, 17 and 18, sixty years after his birth.

The film is directed by Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil, Janis: Little Girl Blue, West of Memphis) and co-produced by Brad Pitt.

The most personal film

“It’s difficult to imagine a time when I wasn’t attempting to make the Jeff Buckley doc. It’s been on my bucket list since I made my first film in 2006. And maybe, since I first heard Grace in 1994. It changed my life forever. It literally became the “tear that hangs inside my soul forever”.

With these words Amy Berg implicitly reveals why It’s never over: Jeff Buckley is her most personal film among the numerous documentaries and features she directed along her filmmaker career.

It has been a long road from 2007 to today — the year Amy Berg first met Mary Guibert, Jeff’s mother and custodian of the musician and songwriter’s archives. After exploring that sea of memories and listening to the audio of the last messages Jeff left on his mother’s voicemail, Amy Berg had no doubts: the documentary was the right path to restore Jeff Buckley and his musical, human and emotional legacy to the world.

Mary Guibert wanted a fiction film to tell the story of her son’s life, and for years Amy Berg tried to convince her to change her mind, until she finally said yes.

“I wanted Jeff to speak for himself” Berg has stated many times, and she stayed true to that goal with the documentary.

The most important women in Jeff Buckley’s life

“His story really comes alive when you sit with the three main women in his life and hear their stories and feel their pain. The film starts and ends with them because you get to know him through his music and these defining relationships” writes Amy Berg in her director’s notes.

In this interview, the filmmaker explains why she felt that the best way to talk about Jeff Buckley  was not only through his music but also through the voice and the memories of the most important women in his life.

A universal story

Throughout his brief life, Jeff Buckley had to contend with the ghost of a father he met only once, yet who was also a music icon. Despite being aware of his own talent , which was neither derivative nor imitative of his father’s, Jeff Buckley was first a boy and then a man who had to fight hard to vanquish his inner demons and find his place in the world.

Plot