More Greetings...
The film’s style follow the music of both Buckleys, folksy and relaxed – however its low-budget shows as often New York City streets are shot in shallow focus to hide the dressing required to make the film look like 1991. I forgive the film these shortcomings due to the excellent performances, including Badgley’s closing number, which is a showstopper. {The Film Stage}
Penn Badgley always knew he could pull off playing Jeff Buckley.
“I choose my words carefully because I don’t want to be … whatever,” says Badgley, looking for the words to describe a scene in his new movie Greetings from Tim Buckley that elicited a spontaneous applause when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.
In the scene, a pre-fame Buckley is wandering a record store with love interest Allie (Imogen Poots). As she holds up records, he simultaneously evokes and mocks the various styles of music in a signature Buckley falsetto. To say more would give things away, but it was a performance worthy of its rapturous reception.
“I was just happy I could do that for Jeff, in the sense that it was invoking him to the point where it was doing him justice,” says Badgley, best known for his role as Dan Humphrey on television’s Gossip Girl. “I’m not him and I can’t do what he did, but I could do that slice of him, and I’ve always been able to do it. Jeff could do things that I could never f–king do, never. But what was required for this story, I could do — all of it.”
In fact, Badgley felt so confident he could evoke enough of Buckley’s vocal sound that he chose the record store scene to use for his audition tape.
“The only audition tape that came in that took on that record store scene was Penn’s, and it was almost as you see it,” writer and director Dan Algrant says. “He just did it and took such risks, and anyone who’s going to take such risks on his audition is my guy. When we filmed it, I remember saying, ‘Keep going, be bold,’ because I would think Jeff would want him to be bold and bolder and boldest, and so we went that way.”
Algrant hopes that process of learning extends to watching the film, scoring it exclusively with Tim’s haunting music in the hopes of bringing it to an otherwise unfamiliar audience. But for Badgley, who played the guitar and sang everything live for the film, it was the chance to explore the younger Buckley’s music that proved to be the biggest learning experience.
“For a month I studied his s–t and then I left it,” he says. “I was actually writing my own music more than ever, and it was a really inspiring thing. The most beautiful thing an artist can do is to speak to people, make them cry and inspire them to create art. That’s what Jeff did for me.” {National Post}
"Jeff was a musician who I've definitely felt- you know, the way that you love a musician when you're a teenager. I went through a brief phase with him. I don't know why it was brief, because now I feel like I understand his music in a way that I would never let it go, but for some reason it was brief. So I listened to him obsessively. Incidently, with Led Zeppelin III a bunch, when I was 17, it always will hold a dear place in my heart." {Penn to Variety}
Jeff Buckley Film Gets New Director, While Penn Badgley Shines in Tim Buckley Film
(...) But another movie with Jeff Buckley– who died in 1997 at age 30 from an accidental drowning– as a central character is ready for release: “Greeting from Tim Buckley” stars “Gossip Girl” actor Penn Badgley as Jeff Buckley. Badgley will leave “Gossip Girl” when it ends this season to have a movie career thanks to his surprising works as the late, lamented singer. He turns out to be a charming musical presence in “Greetings,” a would be John Mayer.
Full disclosure: I have never watched an episode of “Gossip Girl.” I met Badgley outside Shake Shack years ago and didn’t really know what he did. But I can tell you that as Jeff Buckley he is a most pleasant surprise. {ShowBiz411}