‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’ Documentary Director Amy Berg: Interview

In 2008, when American Idol hopeful Jason Castro performed “Hallelujah,” it manifested in the most chart success the late Jeff Buckley had ever received. Buckley was gone ten years at that point, the victim of an accidental drowning in Memphis’s Wolf River in May 1997. And Grace, his lone 1994 studio album which contained his reverent version of Leonard Cohen’s song, was never quite the breakthrough Buckley’s preternaturally beautiful singing voice and deeply intimate performances demanded. But in Castro’s cover and in so many like it resonates the power and allure of a musician whose time and talent were too short for this world.       

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in January, and hits theaters this August before a streaming date later this year on HBO Max. Directed and produced by Oscar and Emmy-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg, the documentary draws on official access to archival footage and recordings of Buckley, as well as his extensive handwritten journals, and features interviews with his mother, Mary Guibert, as well as former romantic partners Rebecca Moore and Joan Wasser. For Berg, it was Buckley’s relationships with the women closest to him that presented the most effecting, sensitive portrait of the musician’s unique perspective on his life and work.     

Decider spoke with Amy Berg about her film, the emotions it raises, the long tail of memory, and Jeff Buckley’s legacy as we approach 30 years since his untimely passing.

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DECIDER: You’ve been out on the road with It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley. What’s the reaction to the film been like? Because it’s the first time that anyone has had full access to the official archives, right?

AMY BERG: People seem excited about it. There’s a real love for Jeff that is kind of on a different level. There’s excitement, and there are people who, you know, talk about seeing him at Sin-é – I’m on the East Coast right now. So there’s a lot of people who actually have been in person with him. And it’s exciting. 

That’s great. I was in college radio in 1994 when Grace came out, so I’m one of these older folks, too, who have some lived experience with that music and with him. So I wonder, when you were making the film and you got all this great access from Mary Guibert, Jeff’s mom – the archives, the unseen footage, the voicemails, the answering machine messages. It’s such a compendium of material, was there something in there that you didn’t expect to find? 

Well, the answering machine messages were my north star in the film, and I really I heard them in like, 2011, 2012, before she had agreed that I could direct the film. I was trying to get this project, trying to get the rights for a long time. So she basically shared some things with me, and I heard those voicemail messages, and they were like the driving force for me in the film.

You see her playing them, and it’s a real, dimensional moment of emotion hitting you, because it’s like you can hear it, see it, see her reaction as you’re having your own. 

Yeah, she hadn’t listened to it in, like, more than 20 years. So it was pretty amazing. 

Did you have a sense there were more people out here trying to put their own thoughts into words, 30 years later, about what Jeff Buckley meant to them? it seems to me that in some of the interviews, people were themselves, enjoying the opportunity to put their own thoughts into words. 

Yeah, this many years later, there’s been the sort of healing that has come from some of the subjects that I spoke to, some of his friends, and it’s really kind of – I guess that’s the greatest part of making of the film. When you can experience that with somebody who has been holding on to something that pains them, and then watching the transformation. And I would say mostly with [former partner] Rebecca Moore and Matt Johnson [Buckley’s former drummer], at this point, because they’ve really not talked about it at all. 

It seemed really true of Johnson, especially, in the film.

And for him, it was so loaded, because he left the band. He didn’t want to really be around that at the time, and then to have to feel that guilt around, you know, Jeff’s passing, and not being there for that, and then going through all of the different feelings that he has. But what’s amazing is the transformation, you know, and when he says that there were things that were buried inside of him, that have been released since he saw the film. It’s really beautiful. And same with Rebecca, she’s never spoken about it, and now she’s like, she came to the screening night and brought her friends and family. 

Did you have any pushback? I mean, don’t give any names, but were there people not interested in speaking? 

No, because I just, I was more focused on the archive and then telling the story that I wanted to tell. So I didn’t go super wide. I wanted to tell the story with this certain kind of slant on it, which is more about Jeff’s loves and feminism and the women in his life. Yeah, that those interviews are really powerful as a way to sort of balance the whole thing out. 

In a linear sense, so many music documentaries can be similar, right? It’s like an arc, and I think this one has that, but is powerful in that it’s also from this place of emotion and memory, whether it’s his mother or his romantic partners. It’s like you could just get them to start talking about it. But of course, you gotta make a film at the same time. 

So that’s where the archive really came in. And I kind of started there. I started in the Edit, and then I took a lot of breaks, and then went out, and came back, worked on it, so it probably took five years. But you know, I think with archive films specifically, I think there’s a good argument to be made that you kind of need to live with the material, you know, to figure out how you want to tell the story. 

And it’s just a little bit different, because it’s hard. In Jeff’s music, and what we see of him in the film, there’s this electric spontaneity. To me that felt like something that would be difficult to capture exactly. 

And that’s a good capture from you, because Jeff was such – he shined better in a smaller venue. And some of those were not filmed, and you can kind of hear it in the audio, but you can’t always see it. It’s such a hard thing to translate. So yes, it was really great that we were, you know, able to spend as much time with all the material and find the right musical moments to go with the emotional moments in his life. 

And then, because obviously you have to sort of reconstruct these parts of his life that don’t have footage. So the animation piece comes in, almost like a character as Jeff, almost like a stick figure lit in energy, who keeps appearing throughout the film. 

And, yeah, that’s the “spastic stick,” is what I called it. But it came from his journal and my amazing collaborator, [animations and graphics producer] Sara Gunnarsdóttir, who lives in Reykjavík, Iceland. She and I have worked together before, and she helped bring this whole thing to life. And I love it so much. Yeah, it was really affecting. I met with her very early, like, right when I met with my first editor. So it was always intended.

You know, in more recent years, TikTok trends and “Hallelujah” popping up on American Idol has created new audiences for Jeff Buckley’s music. Did you want to completely reintroduce him to these new listeners, or just have the film be this impressionistic sense of where he was coming from? 

Yeah. I mean, I kind of do want to introduce him, because you and I got to experience this in the ’90s, in real time, you know, and there were many moments where albums were just the way you found out about who you loved. You just listened to the thing alone in your room, or with a friend or whatever. But today, it’s in all these little snippets. So I feel like these audiences are going to get a glimpse into what it felt like to listen to Grace for the first time, and even maybe more introspective, because we’re understanding it through Jeff’s eyes. 

He has a huge following on TikTok. I mean, it’s crazy, like hundreds of millions of people. It’s weird to have a guy like Jeff Buckley who is hard to pin down and is elusive, you know, this sort of tragic genius, being inserted into something as strange and new as TikTok. I wonder what he would have thought about that. 

I think it’s really good that the film’s coming out now, and yeah, the timing does feel pretty great, which is very unusual for me, and I’m so excited about that. Usually, I do something a little bit ahead of the trend, and it’s harder to get people to focus on it, because sometimes it’s a heavy thing. So yeah, the timing is good.

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It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley is being by released by Magnolia Pictures, and is currently playing in theaters. The documentary will arrive on HBO Max in late 2025.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.