Sunday Conversation: Amy Berg On Her Stunning Jeff Buckley Documentary

Forbes

3 days ago

The Nineties had a lot of seminal rock and alternative albums. Off the top of my head – Soundgarden, Superunknown; Hole, Live Through This; Portishead, Dummy; Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral; of course, Nirvana's Nevermind; Radiohead's OK Computer and my personal favorite, The Afghan Whigs, Gentlemen.
But a quarter of a century after the Nineties ended you can make a strong argument the single most enduring album of that fertile period for rock and alternative is Jeff Buckley's brilliant Grace, an album that now stands squarely in the pantheon of greatest albums ever.
As Buckley's massive legacy grows exponentially larger, a la Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. Nick Drake, Amy Winehouse and others 28 years after his tragic drowning, Buckley has become an almost mythical figure in music for good reason.
Imagine making one album and the likes of Chris Cornell, Alanis Morissette, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page sing your praises. One album that is near perfection and then tragically gone.
Like so many, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg has been haunted by the profound depths of Grace. After years of trying, she has finally turned that fandom and fascination into a riveting must-see documentary, It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley.
I spoke with Berg about the stunning peak into the life of a true genius and enigma.
Steve Baltin: Congratulations on the film. Looking back on it now, do you think it was the record? Or was it the story that called to you?
Amy Berg: I think it was the death and the posthumous impact. He stayed my favorite for so long. I just never got Jeff out of my system. So, his passing really affected me, I would have to say. He had such an angelic kind of voice, he spoke so deeply to me. The music is timeless. It felt unique and it was hard to describe why. So, I wanted to make a film about the enigma of this album and this person and how it encompassed so many different themes for him.
Baltin: Did making the film solve the mystery a little bit of why this album speaks so much to you?
Berg: I think it did. I don't know that it solved the mystery, but I think that it did what I set out for it to do, which was to create the experience of Grace in a visual hour and 46-minute sitting. So, I feel like that is where my joy landed on this. I felt like you could experience
Baltin: I think part of what makes Grace special is there is a mystery to it. No one else in the history of the world that could have made this record.
Berg: Right. But I think the added intimacy of his story helps to make it more tactile for me.
Baltin: The film is wonderful, and I learned a lot about Jeff, even though I've been a fan and written about him extensively for years. It's an amazing story.
Berg: Yeah, and I felt a similar way that I'm describing when I watched Montage of Heck the first time in a theater and I felt like I was inside of Nirvana's music and their world in a way that I missed so much. That's what I wanted to do.
Baltin: It made me rethink him in a lot of ways and in good ways. But I've always seen parallels between him and Nick Drake, who's one of my favorites of all time. I've interviewed Joe Boyd, who was Nick's producer several times. Something he said to me always stood out; he said that he believed part of the reason Nick died was from a broken heart because nobody appreciated his music. It's interesting. Now, I start to think watching this film, maybe Jeff and Nick were opposites, because maybe it was the fact that everybody loved Jeff's music so much that tormented him. Fame is the most dangerous drug there is.
Berg: Exactly. And that is a great way to put it. Yeah, I think that had a lot to do with his inner voice that was constantly gnawing at him.
Baltin: What were some of the things that surprised you most about him?
Berg: I learned a lot about him. I didn't know that much about him personally. And I think what surprised me was possibly how hard he was on himself about everything that was unresolved in his life. I think it makes sense when you consider how unresolved his relationship was with his father. That would make sense, and just how much remorse he had for his breakup with Rebecca, and the disagreements he had with his mother, how much that weighed on him. I think that probably surprised me a lot. The feelings that you experience when you listen to his songs after not hearing them for quite some time is so massive that I guess this was different because I was listening to it every day for many years. So, I look forward to having a break from it and coming back to it again because there is nothing like that feeling of just hearing 'Lover You Should've Come Over' after not hearing it for a couple of years.
Baltin: I love the scene with his father's tribute concert and the way that was portrayed with the animation and everything. And I know several people who worked with him at Columbia and everyone had wonderful things to say. So that one scene where he was asked about his dad's music, and he's like next question, is so telling.
Berg: I also want to say when you say things that surprised me about him, the other thing that I really spent time massaging this into the film and a few different scenes is the impulsiveness of his personality and his behavior was also something I didn't understand until I laid it into his life. It made his death make a lot more sense to me. He just was so impulsive that obviously the water looked so beautiful and there was no thought about the undercurrent or the dangerous aspects of jumping into the Wolf River.
Baltin: That's such a complex thing. Do you feel like you have a better understanding of what happened with that? Because probably not even he knew what was happening at that time.
Berg: No, but I've noticed since that a lot of the most empathetic artists that I've done some research on had similar behavioral traits of just thinking they were invincible and lacking impulse [control]. And I think that goes along with this empathetic persona.
Baltin: Who are the artists you found to be similar?
Berg: Chris Cornell, who he was very close with, would do somersaults downstairs and go from one balcony to another. And I've heard similar things about Kurt Cobain in terms of impulsive behavior. And other similarities, according to Andy Wallace, who produced Jeff's album, there were a lot of similar character traits that they had carried.
Baltin: Chris said something so interesting to me once. He said that great frontmen don't come out of high school standouts or athletes or whatever, they come out of the outcasts. You have Jeff talking there about being bullied and I'm curious how that impacted him, because one of the things I found over the years is it is hard to make that adjustment from being the outcast to having everybody love you.
Berg: Totally. And that there was a lot of evidence of that in his archive. Especially when he was featured in People magazine. He was obviously teased because he was little. He was slight. He was five-four and had very beautiful feminine delicate features. And one time, when his mom came to visit him, he was with Michael [Tighe], who was in the film, and they were walking back to his apartment, and he pulled Michael [in] and kissed him on the lips. And he said, "Look, mom, I can kiss a boy on the lips and nobody's going to make fun of me,' just trying to be fluid before that was a thing, I guess. Jeff initiated a lot of conversations about feminism and fluidity without having to say it, I loved all of that about him. We were in the midst of the Women's March when I first started making this film. That language was right in the forefront, and I was noticing so many similarities between Jeff's language and what the Women's March leaders were saying. He was 25 years earlier and already speaking in that way and it was beautiful. He had such an open mind.
Baltin: Some people just feel like they don't fit in the world. I think sometimes people can be cursed with too much knowledge.
Berg: Right, it's like Ben Harper saying that Jeff's feet didn't seem to be touching the ground and real life was scary in many ways to him. But I do believe he was trying to figure out how to have some balance at the end of his life. All the indications were there for that.
Baltin: I'm not saying anything was intentional. Some people seem just too smart for the world.
Berg: Right, but then there's also a theory that your 20s is for figuring that out and then in your 30s, you figure out how vulnerable you want to be, how exposed you want to be to the world. But there's so much beauty in his vulnerability.