Jeff Buckley’s Mom Shot Down Brad Pitt’s Hopes to Make a Biopic

Brad Pitt was once planning on making a movie about Jeff Buckley, the talented musician who died in 1997 after releasing just one studio album. The Fight Club star invited Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, to his home for lunch in 2000 and asked her for permission to depict Buckley’s life on the big screen. She initially agreed, although remained skeptical.

She told Variety that her response to Pitt was, “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?” She still stayed in contact with Pitt, however, even after she had told him that he could no longer go through with the project.

Director Amy Berg, best known for Oscar-nominated documentary Deliver Us From Evil, reached out to Guibert, too, about a narrative feature on her son’s life. But Berg quickly realized that would be insufficient.

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

This realization resulted in the new documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 24. It currently sports a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. There is currently no word on when or if it will be released to a wider audience.

Buckley is perhaps best known for his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which reached No. 1 on the US digital charts, is frequently utilized in various movies and TV shows, and has been named the greatest song of all time. He drowned while swimming in the Mississippi River on May 29, 1997. His lone album, Grace, is commonly named one of the greatest albums of all time.