Brad Pitt’s Plans for a Jeff Buckley Biopic Were Shut Down by Musician’s Mother

Brad Pitt had dreams of portraying Jeff Buckley on the silver screen, the late musician’s mother has revealed.

Buckley, who passed away in 1997 at the age of 30, was the focus of many artistic endeavors in the wake of his death, though his story has not yet been made into a dramatized film. However, according to Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, Pitt had grand ideas for her son’s iconic tale.

On Friday (Jan. 24), a new documentary called It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley will premiere at Sundance. However, as Variety reports, its origins can be traced back to some plans that Pitt first floated in 2000. According to Guibert, Pitt initiated a friendship with her, ultimately requesting permission to turn Buckley’s story into a biopic. Though she was receptive to the notion at first, it soon left her feeling skeptical.

“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 says she asked Pitt.

Despite the initial bump in the road, Pitt wasn’t the only film-minded individual to desire seeing Buckley’s story on the big screen. Director Amy Berg – who received an Oscar nomination for the 2006 documentary Deliver Us from Evil – later sought to move from nonfiction features to a narrative project, with Buckley as her first focus. Guibert, however, was reticent to “being in a someone’s-learning-on-the-job situation”.

More ideas soon swelled, and when Berg was granted given access to Buckley’s archive, she decided instead to turn the late musician’s story into a documentary. With Pitt joining as executive producer and helping to digitize and preserve Buckley’s belongings, the final product now arrives on Jan. 24 as It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley.

“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,” explained Berg. “And I just didn’t know how you could kind of replicate Jeff in that scripted sense.”

In 2021, however, Guibert was announced as the co-producer of Everybody Here Wants You, a planned biopic which would see Reeve Carney portraying Buckley. “This will be the only official dramatisation of Jeff’s story which I can promise his fans will be true to him and to his legacy,” Guibert said at the time. No updates have been provided since.

Born to Guibert and late folk musician Tim Buckley, Jeff began his career as a session musician before gaining a following throughout venues in Manhattan’s East Village.

After signing to Columbia in 1994, he released his debut album, Grace, which initially received mixed reviews and reached No. 149 on the Billboard 200. Retrospective evaluations have since seen the album considered one of the greatest records of the ’90s, and among the best of all time.

Buckley would pass away in 1997, drowning in Memphis during a spontaneous swim. Though he never completed a second record, Guibert would later compile his demo recordings as 1998’s Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, which would reach No. 64 on the Billboard 200, and receive a Grammy nomination for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the single “Everybody Here Wants You”.