Jeff Buckley will get his biopic, and it will come via director Jake Scott (director of Welcome to the Rileys, and many rock music videos, including U2, The Smashing Pumpkins, REM & Radiohead). Michelle Sy and Orian Williams are serving as producers, and Buckley’s mother, Mary Guilbert, is executive producing, with financing coming from financier Amy Vaughan King. Buckley was an influential musician and son of folk singer Tim Buckley, though he only released one studio album, Grace (1994), before he tragically died in 1997 when he accidentally drowned in the Wolf River Harbour channel of the Mississippi River. At the time, he had been working on his second album. This production has the rights to Buckley’s music and has optioned David Browne’s book Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley. The plan is to kick off production this fall.
Enjoy a selection of Buckley’s heartbreaking songs below as we wait to see who will star in this long-awaited project. (No one looks more like Buckley than James Franco, but he’s got a lot on his plate.) Here is a 1994 interview between Buckley and Interview Magazine, in which he says:
“Words are really beautiful, but they’re limited. Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there’s nothing to hang on to. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is. I need to inhabit every bit of a lyric, or else I can’t bring the song to you–or else it’s just words.”
A 60 minute documentary was made about Buckley in 2004, Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley, by directors Nyla Bialek Adams and Laurie Trombley.
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
